


This Sunlit Land

by eyres



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bearded Steve Rogers, Captain America Sam Wilson, Cats, Dogs, Domestic Fluff, Found Family, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Life on a farm, M/M, NASBB 2020, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Soul Stone (Marvel), THIS IS NOT A SLOW BURN - THEY ARE AN OLD MARRIED COUPLE ON AN IDYLLIC FARM, bucky has goats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:41:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27929179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyres/pseuds/eyres
Summary: In a different timeline, Bucky and Steve have the opportunity to take a quieter path, with some bumps along the way. Featuring: an idyllic farm, dogs named after Disney characters, the Soul Stone, a smattering of plot, and a fairytale ending.____“Here’s how I see it,” the psychiatrist says. “In 2014, you discovered your employer was the old Nazi organization you died to stop. You found out your best friend, who had died in front of you, was actually a POW who had been brainwashed and tortured. Said best friend vanishes after trying to kill you. Two weeks later, you disappear as well. That sounds like someone vulnerable to radicalization.”Steve closes his eyes, tries to visualize Bucky sitting among the flowers, outside their home. The dogs are playing around him. “I want a lawyer.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 167
Kudos: 488
Collections: Not Another Stucky Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [odetteandodile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/odetteandodile/gifts).



> For the 2020 NASBB. 
> 
> I began this fic with the idea to try and do a different take on the traditional, well-trod Post-CATWS story. I realized I hadn't done a longer fic on that topic and wanted to try my hand on something new. However, post March, this fic was my escape while living in a big city during a pandemic. Please forgive the overly idyllic viewpoint of the farm - this is fantasy!
> 
> First off, thank you to Odetteandodile for the absolutely amazing, perfect, inspiring art. The first time I saw the cover, I almost teared up over how perfectly she had captured what was in my head. I can't wait for you all to see it!
> 
> And a huge thanks to Alby Mangroves for the thoughtful and thorough betaing. This fic is SO much better thanks to Alby! 
> 
> This fic will be seven chapters posted over the next few days - I'm also taking finals this week so things may get posted at weird times.

__

_It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. - C.S. Lewis_

### 2014

__

“It’s okay,” the man wearing Steve’s face says, holding up his hands because Steve already has pulled his shield off of his back. “I’m not... just, look.” He steps aside and Steve sees Bucky is laying on the couch, curled on his side in a big, ill-fitting coat.

Everything goes blurry and the shield thumps to the thin carpet.

Bucky. Jesus god. Bucky.

The last time Steve had seen him had been on the helicarrier and now he’s tucked on his couch. Steve’s looked for him. He’s scoured DC. He and Sam are supposed to follow a lead to Europe in two days to hunt for him there. All Steve has been able to think about is finding Bucky and saving Bucky and now…

His heart is hammering in his chest and Steve pushes around the man who looks like him. Bucky. He goes to his knees next to the couch, puts a hand on Bucky’s forehead. His fingers are shaking.

He’s pale, hair lank and greasy over his face, but he’s breathing evenly and there’s no blood or bruises. He’s warm to the touch and his eyes move a little under his paper thin eyelids, like he’s just dreaming.

“He’s okay,” the man says from behind them. “Or, he’ll be okay. He was at a homeless encampment; down near the Smithsonian. He was going there every day to look at the exhibit. What I did... it took a lot out of him and he’s going to sleep a lot at first. He’ll remember you now. I did my best to fix what Hydra...”

Steve recognizes the sound of his own voice going hoarse with anger and grief.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I’m you,” the man says. “From the future - or a different timeline. It’s complicated. I hope my future isn’t yours. I hope I did that much.”

Steve stands and turns, but keeps his body between Bucky and the man.

The man is keeping completely still, hands up and spread to show he’s not a threat. He’s older than Steve is now, clearly. There are lines around his mouth and the furrow between his eyebrows has deepened. His hair is a little longer, shoulders a little broader. It is him, though: Steve recognizes his own eyes, recognizes the way he’s holding his shoulders.

“Why?” he asks Rogers.

Rogers purses his mouth and Steve can see a deep, desperate grief in his older eyes. He reaches into his pouch and pulls out a small leather bag, holding it out. “Here.”

Steve reaches out automatically and takes it. He opens up the drawstring and peers inside.

An orange rock, smaller than his palm, glows within. “What is it?”

“It’s the Soul Stone,” Rogers says, voice rough. “We had to borrow it from this timeline to save ours. N… someone I loved died here to get it and I tried to bring her back. But..” his face cracks with sorrow and old rage. “It’s hard to explain. I got to talk to her though. I’m not entirely sure of what the stone does - but it’s powerful and neither of us wanted to just put it back. So we thought… well, we know you’ll keep it safe and, maybe, it’ll keep you and Bucky safe, too. Give you both chances that we didn’t have.”

Steve swallows hard. “I’m not sure...”

“I know you’re not - but I’m sure. And she is too.” Rogers manages a brittle smile, then he nods in the direction of the kitchen table. “I made some arrangements,” he says. “You’ll want to hide it. You’ll want to keep Bucky safe and that means going below ground for a while. It means giving up the shield.”

Steve’s eyes go to where the shield is still laying on its back near the door.

“I know,” Rogers says. “I remember when I couldn’t imagine giving it up either. I couldn’t imagine not fighting - but I’m telling you, it’s what Bucky needs right now. He won’t tell you - but if you push him, he’s going to have to find it without you.”

Briefly, Steve entertains the idea that Rogers is a Hydra plant, sent to convince him to abandon the fight but, then he looks back down to where Bucky is huddled on the couch and he knows it’s true.

“It’s a different battle” Rogers says gently, like he really does understand how hard it is for Steve to accept this. “A quieter one. I don’t know what the future here holds exactly - but I know you’ll need him to get through it. We always did need him more than anything else.”

A thick lump is growing in Steve’s throat and he nods, squeezing his hand around the stone. It feels warm, almost humming in his grip.

“You can give the shield to Sam,” Rogers continues, like he’s thought all of this through. “He’ll know what to do with it. Natasha will help you leave. She’ll understand. Peggy...” His voice goes rough again and he pauses to inhale. “She always understood too.”

Bucky stirs a little on the couch and Steve sits back down, smoothing a hand over his hair. There are dark shadows in the hollows of his face and Steve runs his thumb over Bucky’s cheekbone, trying to soothe. When he looks back, Rogers is watching him, eyes tender like a bruise.

“Don’t take him for granted,” the older man says and then straightens. “I have to go. More stops to make.”

“Are you going back to him?” Steve asks, unable to stop himself. “After you’re done?”

Rogers pauses and his shoulders loosen, just a little. “Yes,” he says, firmly and almost joyously. “I am. He’s waiting for me. The place I found for you,” he nods in the direction of the folder. “He found it for us. We’re going there, when I get back.”

### 

He calls Natasha while Bucky is in the bath, washing off the grit of sleeping rough in the National Mall for two weeks. The door is partially open and steam is billowing into the hallway. Steve is sitting on the floor right next to the door and his eyes feel gritty and his stomach is hollow.

She picks up on the second ring.

“I want to go to Hawaii,” is what he says. It’s a little strangled but hopefully no one will listen to this recording until it’s much too late.

Natasha laughs merrily over the line. “Any idea which island?”

“Yes.” He stares up at the bland ceiling and thinks how much he’ll miss her. “Just need some help with travel plans.”

She hums over the phone. “Give me six hours,” she says. “I’ll set you up with first class tickets and a resort package. You’ll be going alone?”

“No, I...” Steve listens to the shower water rain down. “I have... there will be someone with me.”

The phone is dead quiet for just a split second longer then would be totally natural. “Steve,” Natasha says playfully. “I bet it’s that cute nurse from down the hall. I’ll get you the honeymoon suite.”

She hangs up.

Steve lets his head thunk back against the wall.

“Buck,” he calls, just loud enough that he knows he’ll be heard over the shower. “We’ll be leaving in the morning. There’s some place safe. I think you’ll like it.”

The shower turns off and Steve hears the sound of a towel being lifted and wrapped. A few moments later, the door opens and Bucky is looking down at him. “Together?” He says, voice more gravelly than in Steve’s memories.

Steve nods. “Together.”

### 

Natasha knocks on the door two hours before dawn.

“Didn’t expect you personally,” Steve says. There are three duffles on the floor behind him: clothes, weapons, and all the cash he could pull from his bank account this late at night.

Her eyes are large in her face. “Had to say goodbye,” she says.

Steve swallows. He’s not going to apologize for leaving but a hot ache thrums against his ribs anyway. He remembers her face in Sam’s apartment, early that morning after they had almost been killed by SHIELD. Had it been just a few weeks ago?

“There are letters for you and Sam and Peggy,” he says. “On the kitchen table. The shield is in the closet. You can give it to Sam after he reads the letter.”

She nods and reaches into her jacket. The envelope she hands him is heavy. “Passports, birth certificates, drivers licenses, high school diplomas. A whole new life. For both of you. I’m still laying the groundwork - in about two weeks even I wouldn’t be able to know those weren’t real. There are keys in there too, for the truck out front, and a bank account. It’s untraceable but I’ll be able to keep it full.”

“Thank you.” Steve tucks the envelope under his arm.

“There’s a sat phone in there too,” Natasha says. “Only I have the number and my number is programmed in there. It’s untraceable - the signal will bounce all over the world no matter where you are. Keep it charged, will you, Cap?”

He nods and his throat feels thick. “I wish...” he starts, but stops when she shakes her head furiously.

“Wishes are for children, Cap,” she says, not meanly but firmly. Then, she steps forward and cups his cheeks. “Take care of yourself,” she says. “Be happy.”

Minutes after she leaves, Steve bundles Bucky into the passenger seat of the pick up truck she’d left for them. It’s not new but it’s clean, leather smelling of pine. There is already a blanket and a pillow sitting on the back bench and he tucks them around Bucky, smoothing the hair back from his forehead.

He’s so thin, Steve thinks. Gaunt.

He presses a kiss to Bucky’s forehead and goes back for their duffle bags.

### 

Steve drives all day, stopping only for gas and drive-throughs.

Bucky sleeps most of the time, curled against the window with his metal arm twisted against his stomach. He snores a little and sometimes shivers, like he’s dreaming of somewhere cold. So Steve keeps the heater on, even as the sun makes the truck warm around them.

He finally wakes up as the sun starts going down again, dark hair puffy where it’s been pressed to a pillow. There’s a red mark along one cheek and his eyes are sleepy and Steve feels so overwhelmed by the reality of him.

Bucky uses the bathroom while Steve fills up the tank and, when he walks back toward the pick up, he holds up a pair of candy bars. He’s not quite smiling but his gray eyes are soft, warm in the late, red sunlight. “Remember you having a sweet tooth,” he says.

They drive all that night too. Steve takes three hours to nap at a rest stop along the highway and then gets going again. Natasha will cover their tracks, but he doesn’t want to take any chances.

They cross into Canada once they hit Montana, going over in the early morning hours, just ten minutes before the night shift is due to clock out. A sleepy border guard reviews their passports and stamps them, waving them through with, “Welcome to Canada.”

Bucky opens his passport as they drive away. He hums under his breath. “James Butler,” he says. “She works fast. What about you?”

Steve tosses him his passport.

Bucky opens it up and is quiet for a moment. “Steve Butler,” he says out loud. “Brothers, you think? Or married?”

His hands go clammy on the steering wheel and Steve keeps his eyes on the road. “I told her,” he coughs, clears his throat. “I told her that we... during the war. And before.” He stumbles to a stop. God, what if Bucky hadn’t remembered? What if Bucky didn’t want to remember? What if...

“I remember,” Bucky says.

Steve risks a glance and sees that his thumb is pressed to Steve’s passport photo. “It’s not... people accept it now, Buck. I know we haven’t talked about it.” This isn’t a conversation that Steve wants to have while driving but there’s nowhere to pull over. “I don’t want nothing from you that you’re not willing to give. The war was a long time ago. You with me is enough. You don’t have to worry....”

Bucky’s fingers suddenly land on Steve’s, prying his right hand from the steering wheel and clasping their hands together. “Steve,” he says. “One of the very first things I really knew... even before I got all my memories back was that I loved you.”

Steve’s eyes suddenly feel very full. He doesn’t want to cry. He’s an ugly crier. Even his ma told him he was an ugly crier. “I love you too,” he manages and when he cuts his gaze from the traffic, Bucky is smiling so big he’s glowing.

### 

They drive up through Canada, sticking to the less traveled roads. It’s been almost three weeks and there’s no news out of DC. Steve doesn’t know if that’s good or bad. The route they take is meandering, curving north and west and then circling back south and east for a while. They sleep in the truck most nights, curled up in the backseat with their legs tangled together. Some nights they park far enough off the road they won’t be spotted and sleep in the truck bed, staring up at the stars and holding hands like they’re kids fighting in Europe.

They both have beards now and Bucky’s hair is pulled back in a bun most days. Steve doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror with the beard. He fusses with it in gas station bathrooms while Bucky laughs at him.

He waits until they’re in Alaska, waits until the landscape is empty and the sky is large and Bucky’s not sleeping so much anymore.

The number has been in his wallet since that day in D.C. and he takes it out, smooths it with his big hands. Bucky gets them a table at a roadside diner, orders pancakes and plays with the sugar packets while Steve hunches his shoulders and dials at a rusty old pay phone in the small breezeway.

The call gets picked up after only two rings.

“I’m calling about the house?” he says and the man humphs.

“You Steve? Was wondering when you were gonna get up here. I can meet you at the property with the keys. You got the address?”

Steve flips the paper over and sees the address scrawled in a version of his own messy handwriting. “Yep. We’re down outside Anchorage.”

“If you drive straight through, you can get here just before sunset. No service out there but I’ll hang out til just after dark.”

Steve nods. “Thank you.”

The man grunts. “Been trying to offload that property for a while. You’re doing me a favor.”

### 

Ten hours later, Steve turns the pickup down an overgrown path and bumps over potholes and roots to a small clearing. A large, sloping house sits in the middle. There's a sagging porch with a swing and a slumping chimney. The windows are dirty and weeds are grown up around the sides, vines creeping toward the roof. Closer back to the trees, there’s a barn with a half collapsing roof and peeling paint. Solar panels are set up nearby, but they’re covered in pine needles and branches.

But, in the other direction, just down a short path that winds toward a bluff, Steve can see the blue of the ocean: a clear expanse of white caps and dark waves, glittering as the late evening sunlight.

A large man stands up from the swing as he parks, dressed in flannel and thick work boots.

"Steve?" he calls out.

Steve squeezes Bucky's hand. "Stay in the car," he says and gets out, slamming the door shut. The unkempt beard and the shaggy hair around his ears should be enough of a disguise, but he keeps the baseball cap he picked up in Anchorage pulled low over his forehead anyway. "That's me," he tells the man. "Thanks for coming out on short notice."

The man huffs wordlessly and lifts his shoulders. "It's not much. No electricity out here - just the generator. Water tank is tricky. No internet or phones. Not many people interested."

Steve nods. The tenement they'd lived in before the war had none of those things either. "Fifteen thousand cash is the last bit right?" he replies.

"Yup. Deed’s already in your name. Everything’s been signed and I have the keys right here." The man hooks his fingers through his belt and Steve opens the truck door and leans into the back seat, and pulls out an envelope with the exact amount. The last thing he wanted was to be rummaging through the whole duffel bag of bills for this part.

He hands it over and the man opens it, thumbs over the stack.

"You'll like it out here," he says, handing over a pair of keys. "It's quiet. You and your..."

"Friend," Steve finishes. "And we will. We need some quiet."

The man purses his lips. "Military?" he asks and there's the tiniest bit of an edge.

Steve crosses his arms. The news about Hydra must've reached all the way up here too. He thinks how it must look: two exhausted military guys putting down cash for a tiny house in the middle of nowhere. He could just let it go. But, somehow, he cannot bear the idea that someone could mistake either of them for Hydra.

"Yes," he says. "Just got back from overseas... when everything happened in D.C., we thought it best to lay low. No desire to tangle with Hydra."

"Understood." The man tucks the cash into his back pocket and nods toward his pickup. "I'll leave you to it."

Steve waits until he drives off before walking up to the porch. It creaks under his weight, but seems solid enough. The lock on the door is strong and the hinges don’t squeak at all when he pushes the door open. Inside, the floors are smooth planks of polished wood and a fine layer of dust covers the furniture. To the right of the door, there’s a small living room with a couch and two chairs pointing toward a dark stone fireplace. Large windows line the far wall, framing the green bluffs and then the vast ocean. 

In the kitchen, the cupboards are bare and a large refrigerator is unplugged, the door swung wide open to reveal empty shelves. Steve runs his finger through the thick dust on the sturdy oak table. He can see the faint lines of where a hot mug had sat or a knife had slipped off the plate once upon a time. It’s a good table: maybe Bucky will sit here at night and read paperbacks like he did back in Brooklyn. Maybe, they’ll have dinners here, every night, like a real family. 

Steve peeks into the tiny office off the living room before heading up the wide flight of stairs to the second story. There are three bedrooms and Steve checks the two smaller ones on the east side of the house before opening the door to the one on the west side.

The sunlight is instantly warm on his face, pouring in from the floor-to-ceiling window that almost stretches the full length of the far wall. Heavy curtains frame the blue ocean and the brilliant pinks and oranges of the setting sun. The bluff is dark with shadows already, but off to the south, he can see purple mountains rising up, thick fog circling their middles. He takes a deep breath of the slightly stale air. It’s like a picture book, he thinks. Bucky will love this. He always pressed his face to the train window as they rode toward Staten Island, hunting for that first glimpse of sandy shores and blue waves. 

Now, Bucky will be able to wake up to it every morning. 

He sweeps the room carefully, just as he had done the others. The king bed pushed against the back wall has a firm mattress, though no pillows or blankets. A bookshelf and a stone fireplace are on the wall furthest from the door, dusty but with wood stacked next to it. It looks cozy, romantic even, like something that was drawn on the covers of one of his Ma’s old romance novels that she kept on her bedside table. Next to the fireplace, a small doorway leads to a large bathroom: there’s a shower and sinks and a toilet; but Steve’s attention is immediately drawn to the massive claw-foot tub set against a smaller round window that peeks out toward the ocean.

The tub is easily big enough for him and Bucky and, when he tries the tap, clear water immediately gushes out. Bucky used to love baths. He’d cart water down the hall every Saturday morning to fill up their tiny tin tub that sat in their kitchen. He’d lay in it for hours and listen to music on the record player, arms sprawled on either side like it was a throne. 

Steve swallows. His heart feels soft. Now, Bucky can do it every night. 

With the overview done, Steve takes the time to go over the entire house meticulously, just the way Natasha had taught him.

He finds the entrance to a surprisingly large cellar on the other side of the fireplace and the entrance to a small, stuffy attic over the master bedroom. He checks the pipes in the kitchen and looks up both fireplaces with a flashlight. He feels the walls and knocks on the floor. In the fireplace, he finds a loose stone that comes all the way out to reveal a small, empty hollow on the other side. 

There are no bugs, no hidden rooms: nothing that wasn't explicitly laid out in the papers. Tension loosening in his shoulders. He takes the time to start a fire downstairs and upstairs to chase off some of the chill, using the wood stacked near the porch and a small book of matches he got in town. He'll need to make a list for a grocery run. They'll need towels and soap, dishes and silverware.

Bucky is half asleep against the window when he goes back and Steve just scoops him up. He's still so skinny and Steve would've carried him all the way across Canada if he'd had to. He settles Bucky on the couch and drapes a scratchy wool blanket from one of the closets over him. The duffel bags come in next: their clothes go in the bedroom and the money goes in the tiny attic. The weapons stay near the door.

When the door is locked securely, he digs through the duffle bag with the clothes and pulls out the small leather bag. Inside, the Soul stone winks at him. It’s almost warm in his hand. Carefully, he carries it over to the fireplace and removes the loose rock he found there, putting the leather bag deep inside and covering it back over. 

They’ll need a better place for it, but it’ll do for now.

It's almost fully dark by the time he’s done, sunlight fading over the blue ocean, so Steve just makes them sandwiches with what's left of their meat and bread and cheese, wraps them up in tinfoil and sets them down in coals of the fire. He pours a can of soup into a thick bottom pot he finds in the cupboard and hangs it over the fire. He'll figure out the generator tomorrow so he can get the oven and stove going. 

They eat in silence: Bucky shovels food into his mouth mechanically, though he does smile a little at the melty cheese oozing up along the crusts.

There are no sheets or pillows to be found so Steve lays out their sleeping bags on the mattress in the west side bedroom. They both strip down to their undershirts and briefs and Bucky kisses Steve on his collarbone as they curl onto the bed together. Steve tucks the wool blanket around Bucky. With the fire banked low, he plasters himself to Bucky’s back and falls into a dreamless sleep.

### 

Steve wakes up and the bed is empty next to him. Sunlight is pouring through the dusty windows and the door of the bedroom is hanging open. Nothing seems disturbed. The house is quiet around him.

There’s no reason to panic, yet his heart thuds against his ribs. He hasn’t been more than an arm’s length from Bucky in weeks. What if something happened? What if someone came? What if...

He gets up carefully, stays light on his toes as he slips down the stairs, not bothering to put shoes on or dress. The pot from last night still hangs in the fireplace and the keys to the truck are still on the table.

Outside, the air is cool and the smell of salt water wafts up from the cove. The pickup is parked where he left it. He’s about to really start worrying, when he catches a glimpse of dark hair near the trail down toward the bluffs.

Bucky.

His lungs relax and Steve lets the tension trickle out of his shoulders. He pushes a hand through his mussed hair and walks across the driveway.

Bucky is sitting in the middle of long green grasses. Flowering shrubs surround him, bright purple and yellow and pale white petals. He’s cross legged, just in a white tank top and sweatpants. The sun is streaming down around his dark hair and all the red scars around his shoulder stand out sharply. His bare feet have dirt between the toes, grass stains crawling up the bottoms of his sweatpants.

He looks up when Steve gets close and his blue gray eyes are almost glittering in the sunlight. A yellow flower is in his hands, held delicately by metal fingers. For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything. He watches Steve get close, doesn’t move as Steve sits down in the grass in front of him.

The grass is scratchy against Steve’s bare ankles but the dirt is warm and the breeze is cool and salty. All he can hear is their breaths and the breeze and the waves. Bucky is glowing, Steve thinks. He is a wonder and Steve will never get tired of watching him. Even on the helicarrier, with fire raining down, it had been hard not to just watch him.

“I’ve never been to a place like this,” Bucky says at last. He scoots close so that their knees are just touching in the long grass.

Steve tears his eyes away from Bucky. He can see mountains in the distance. Dark trees hem the meadow in on three sides and, in front of him, past the edge of the bluff, the dark and wild ocean spreads out to the horizon. He can see white caps and gulls spiraling on air currents. It’s not like any place he’s ever been. There’s a wildness to it: a freedom from all of the weight of responsibility and destiny.

“Why did you bring us here?” Bucky asks softly.

Steve keeps his hands very still on his thighs, palms up and open. The wind is making the pine trees shiver. “Because I want us to be safe,” he says. “I want you to be...” He hesitates because how could he be so arrogant to think he can make Bucky happy with just a deserted cabin.

When Steve looks back, Bucky’s eyes are fixed on him and the expression is so tender that Steve feels almost pained by it. How, after all the ways he failed Bucky, can he still look at him like this?

“We used to dream about a farm,” Bucky whispers. “Remember? After the war. We’d get some land upstate. You’d marry Peggy and I’d live in the guesthouse. You’d have a whole passel of kids and I’d spoil them all.”

Steve’s eyes sting. “I never wanted kids, Buck. I wanted you. Any time. Any place. I would’ve married you.”

Bucky reaches forward and grabs his wrist. “Back then, we wouldn’t have. Peggy loved you and you loved her and that would’ve been enough. But now...” His fingers gentle on Steve’s skin, stroking the pulse point. He smiles a little.

Steve swallows. “But now.”

“We have our farm,” Bucky murmurs.

Steve doesn’t say I never wanted a farm. I never wanted kids. My imagination was small and I just knew I’d be happy if you were there so I just nodded along to all of your dreams because of course they were my dreams too. Instead, he leans forward and takes Bucky’s face in his hands. “We have our farm,” he repeats.

Bucky kisses him, slow and sweet and like they have all the time in the world. His hands slide up Steve’s bare arms and under his thin t-shirt and press into Steve’s ribs. He tastes like mint and honey and they fit perfectly together like they always have.

When he pulls back, his whole face is shining and Steve loves every bit of him.

“You’ll be safe here,” Steve says, a vow. “I’ll keep you safe forever.”

Bucky smiles like he’s indulging Steve, reaching out and stroking the side of Steve’s face, running his fingers through the wild of Steve’s hair. His palms are warm and Steve leans into them smelling dirt and sunshine on Bucky’s skin.

“I know you will,” Bucky tells him, so gentle that Steve wants to curl into his lap. “Just like I will keep you safe.”

### 

They walk down to the cove after dinner, finding an old steep trail down the bluffs. Gray storm clouds have rolled in and the sunlight is a dim gold as it falls across endless blue water.

Bucky takes off his boots and wades in the water and Steve sits on the sand and watches him. Waves splash up and soak the knees of his jeans and Bucky laughs like it’s the greatest joke.

“Do you even know how to swim?” Steve calls. He’s scooping up handfuls of sand and letting it trickle through his fingers.

“I think Hydra must’ve covered that at some point,” Bucky calls back.

Steve sucks in a breath, stomach going cold. He stares down at the sand in his big hands. God, he’s so clumsy. He should’ve thought about that. He opens his mouth to apologize.

When he looks up, Bucky is staring back, hair blowing in the wind and the dark gray ocean matching his eyes. “Hey,” he says. “No.”

Bucky clambers out of the ocean and up the sandy beach, crouching in front of Steve. “It’s you,” he says, placing both his hands on Steve’s knees and leaning on them. “You don’t tiptoe around me. If you hurt me, I tell you. If I hurt you, you tell me. We have to do it that way, Steve. We’ve been through too much to not be honest with each other. I wouldn’t have said that if you had hurt me.”

Steve inhales the cold sea air and curls his hands around Bucky’s wrists: even the metal one feels warm in the chill breeze. He thinks about waking up in the future and being so alone, of pulling deep inside himself and not trusting anyone. He’d bottled up all that grief and fear and loss because who could he trust? Who could he let take all those massive feelings and not turn around and use them against him?

He spent the first 24 years of his life convinced that if he showed one moment of weakness, of softness, that he’d be mocked and crushed. How does he unlearn that? “Okay,” he says. “I’m not always good at that though.”

Bucky’s eyes go soft. “I know, sweetheart,” he says because, of course he knows. He’s always been stronger, always seen through the brittle shell. “But you have to talk to me. It’s just us out here. No one can hurt us - not anymore.”

“I love you,” Steve says. His heart flutters when Bucky leans forward to kiss him. It feels like magic, still: to be sitting on a beach and kissing Bucky. It’s a fantasy.

Bucky’s mouth is warm and gentle and Steve lets him guide the kiss, tipping his head back when Bucky sits up on his knees, leaning over him. His metal hand cups the back of Steve’s head and Steve feels small and shivery.

It’s not until a fat drop of water lands right on his cheek that Steve realizes it’s raining. He opens his eyes and the whole sky is obscured by thick streaks falling. The sand is turning dark around them and the ocean is loud with the sound.

Bucky sits back and his white shirt is sticking to his shoulders, hair plastered to his forehead. Water is dripping down his eyelashes but his eyes don’t leave Steve’s, like Steve is the most important thing in the world.

“We should go inside,” Steve says, loud over the storm.

“We should.” Bucky doesn’t move. Then, he tips his head back and shakes his hair. Droplets join the rain and when he’s done, his hair is curling around his ears. “C’mon.”

Steve takes his hands and they stand together. Bucky gathers his boots and socks and they walk up the steep path toward the cabin, hand in hand. 

### 

Bucky screams himself awake that night. Steve wraps him up in his arms and holds him tight as he shakes. The light outside the windows is gray, dawn already coming in the lengthening spring days. The rain clouds have mostly cleared and the sky is dark and clear.  
  
“It’s okay,” he soothes. He presses kisses to Bucky’s brow, rocks him as he stares out at the fading stars. “It’s okay. You’re not there anymore. You’re here. You’re with me.”  
  
Silent tears are on Bucky’s cheeks and he presses his face into Steve’s shoulder. “You don’t know what I did,” he says, a little muffled. “You don’t… I didn’t remember it all at first but it’s coming back. The things…”  
  
“It wasn’t you,” Steve tells him. The file that Natasha gave him on the Winter Soldier is back in DC, buried in the bottom of his drawer. He’s read the whole thing, knows all the details about what Hydra made Bucky do. He knows. 

Steve desperately wants Bucky to know that there aren’t any misconceptions. Steve isn’t turning his gaze away from reality. He loves Bucky in the full light of a bright day, all their mutual histories laid bare. “I read every last word, Buck, and it wasn’t you. They made you. They took…”  
  
“I still did it.” Bucky pushes back and his gray eyes meet Steve’s head on. In the dim early dawn, his entire face is shadowed, mouth twisted and deep. “It was still my hands. My gun. Me. I remember all of them now. Howard Stark. Did you know I killed him? And his wife.”  
  
Steve closes his eyes because he does know, or at least, suspected after what Zola said. It hadn’t been in the file but… “It wasn’t you,” he repeats as steadily as he can. “It was Hydra. I know you, Buck. It doesn’t matter, okay? It doesn’t matter. Not to me.”  
  
“Maybe it should.” Bucky sits up and the sleeping bag puddles around his bare hips. He leans forward and rests his head in his hands, grabbing fistfuls of his hair.  
  
Steve sits up too, leans back against the headboard. The fire is banked low across the room, orange embers glowing underneath blackened wood. He watches Bucky for a while, the bare curve of his shoulder and how the shadows fall across his chest. He thinks of waking up in New York City, all alone, and how he dreamt of Bucky’s face. He thinks of how lucky he is, blessed beyond all understanding, to be sitting here now.  
  
“When I talked to my future self,” he says at last, a little hushed. “He told me that you were the most important thing. I don’t know if he meant to me or the universe or…” Steve trails off and stares out at the mist that’s beginning to rise over the bluff. It looks soft, delicate wisps reaching over the wildflowers. “There’s nothing you could do,” he continues. “Nothing that would make me leave you because I know you. I know that they hurt you and it makes me want to rip them apart with my bare hands. I know you would never do any of that willingly. I know that you survived.”  
  
Bucky’s shoulders hitch a little.  
  
“Do you know how few people would have survived, Buck?” Steve shakes his head and his throat feels rough from tears. “I wouldn’t have. Do you know how strong that makes you? How ridiculously strong and wonderful and…” his voice actually breaks now and Steve pulls his knees up to his chest, hunching his shoulders in. Sometimes, it helps to feel small.  
  
After a few minutes, there is pressure against his side and Bucky is leaning there, head on Steve’s shoulder. Steve tips his own head over, so they’re folded together, pressed close on the bare mattress. His heart is heavy, sunk right into his stomach, but, as they sit together and watch a slow light spread over their cove, he thinks it might someday be okay again.


	2. Chapter 2

“I think it’s stuck,” Bucky says blandly from the passenger seat as Steve steps on the gas pedal of the truck again.  
  
Steve presses his lips together as the wheels splutter and spin in the mud. “I drove a tank through France,” he says mournfully. “You’d think I’d be able to drive up a dirt road.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t smile but his mouth twitches. He’s pale above the heaviness of his beard and dark-eyed from the nightmares but his shoulders aren’t rigid lines around his ears anymore. “C’mon,” he says, opening the door. “You push, I’ll steer.”  
  
“Why am I pushing?” Steve asks, even as he obeys.  
  
Bucky gently shoves at Steve’s shoulder as he comes around the front and hops up into the driver’s seat. “Because I don’t want to get mud on my jeans. And I was the one pushing in France.”  
  
Steve sighs and heads to the back. The rear left wheel is sunk into a deep puddle from the rainstorm last night. His boots squelch in the mud and Steve grimaces. “Okay,” he calls and leans his shoulder into the back corner. He braces his feet and shoves as the wheels start to spin.  
  
At first, nothing moves and Steve grits his teeth. Then, the truck moves all at once and Steve knows, a second before it happens, that he’s going to overbalance. His arms pinwheel and he manages to spin just enough that he lands on his hands and knees rather than his ass as the truck finally revs free of the ditch. Mud seeps into the front of his jeans and Steve stares down.  
  
“You okay?” Bucky calls. He’s half hanging out the open driver’s door of the truck and Steve thinks he can see a dimple under his beard.  
  
“Peachy,” Steve says and stands up.  
  
Bucky meets him at the driver’s door. “You wanted a farm,” he says, with no inflection.  
  
Steve can’t help it. He reaches forward and wipes his muddy hands on Bucky’s flannel shirt.  
  
It’s quiet. Bucky stares down at his shirt and then back up at Steve, long and slow. “Good to see you’re still a little shit,” he says at last. “Can’t say how many times my ma cursed your name when she was trying to wash up my best clothes.”

Steve smiles helplessly and pulls Bucky close, kissing him firmly. “Yet still you stick around.”  
  
Bucky leans back and swipes a thumb over Steve’s forehead. It comes away with a splotch of mud. “Yet still I do.” He pulls away and heads back to the other side of the truck. “C’mon, Rogers. I want to actually sleep with pillows and blankets tonight.”  
  
The nearest town is about a two hour drive down the coast. It’s a long, windy highway that curves along bare bluffs toward the dark mountains ahead. The sun is bright, gleaming across a dark blue ocean, and Bucky rolls down his window, lets his arm hang out and the wind lifts up his palm as the truck eats up the miles. Sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, Steve thinks he sees him smiling out at the long beach and thick trees.  
  
As they get closer, they start seeing more little houses and cars. It’s a small town: Steve’s not even sure they’ve reached it until he sees a sign thanking them for visiting and he has to turn around and go back. There’s a general store, a cheery diner that has “and bar” tacked onto to the end of its sign, and a clean looking building that says “CLINIC – HUMANS AND ANIMALS” on the front. A small cluster of houses sits just off the road and there are a bunch of trucks parked out near a small dock that extends out into the ocean.  
  
Bucky nods in the direction of the diner. “I need coffee,” he announces. “I’ll head over and get us a table?”  
  
Steve nods and pulls out the list they wrote up this morning out of his back pocket. “Yeah – I’ll be fine.”  
  
The General Store smells like dried fruits and wood oil. It’s a long, well lit building with overstuffed shelves that go all the way up to the ceiling. There are fishing poles and heavy burlap sacks and even a little jewelry stand near the front.  
  
Steve wanders a bit, feeling a little overwhelmed, before the clerk comes around the aisles to him.  
  
“Can I help you?” he asks. The man has thick dark hair and dark eyes and something in the keenness of his gaze reminds Steve so sharply of Sam that he has to swallow down the missing.  
  
“I have a list,” Steve explains, holding the paper aloft in demonstration. “My friend and I. We just moved in, bought a house a couple hours up the highway on the land by the cove.”  
  
The man hums and rests his fingers on his chin. “I know the one. That’s a fixer upper for sure. Been empty for almost three years now.”  
  
Steve nods.  
  
The man surveys Steve for a moment, as if he’s trying to work something out. Then slowly, he nods. “Well, you’re gonna get snowed in up there come winter, so be sure you build your stores up before then. It’s almost time for spring planting and I can show you which seeds’ll do best.”  
  
Planting? Steve had known it was a farm – but this is the first time he’s thought of planting. He hasn’t done anything that resembles farming since he was burying potatoes in a few inches of dirt in a box on a window sill in Brooklyn. They’ll make it work though. “Thank you,” he says, bobbing his head. “That would be great.”  
  
“And my wife and I have some extra goats and chickens that can get you started. You’ll want a cow eventually, but goat milk’ll get you through the winter just fine. And, if you take care of the chickens right, you’ll have fresh eggs all winter and that’s something you can’t put a price on.” He pulls a pad of paper. “You work on your list and I’ll draw up a list of other things you might need. Anything we’re missing, I’ll pick it up in Anchorage on my next trip. You want to open an account here?”  
  
Steve shakes his head. “I have cash.”  
  
The man nods and holds out his hand. “I’m Ed Jefferson,” he says. “This is mine and my wife’s store. She’s also one of the doctors over at the clinic. We’ve been here for almost thirty years so if you have any questions, just ask.”  
  
“Steve Butler.” Steve shakes his hand. “Thank you.”  
  
By the time he heads over to the diner, his wallet is lighter and the truck is much heavier. Bags of rice and beans and dried fruit and flour and sugar fill the back, along with seeds and fertilizer and farm tools. There’s chicken feed and goat feed and pots and pans and cans of meat and vegetables and jerky. They also have sheets, blankets, pillows, and towels.  
  
The little bell jangles over the door of the diner as Steve pushes his way inside with a gust of ocean wind. The smell of onions and bacon frying fill the air and his stomach growls. Only four booths and four table tops fill the small room, along with a long bar space in the back that opens into a cramped kitchen. There’s an older couple sitting in one of the booths when he comes in, but that’s it. No Bucky.  
  
His shoulders tighten – but before he can get any more worked up, an older woman with graying brown hair pokes her head out between a pair of saloon style doors that lead to the kitchen.  
  
“You Steve?” she asks and he nods. She smiles. “Bucky’s back here. He looked like he could use a friend, so I introduced him to the pups.”  
  
Steve follows her back through the kitchen and into what looks like a storage room. Bucky is there, sitting on the floor against some boxes, and a litter of at least 10 fat, furry puppies are squirming over his lap and arms.  
  
A little brown one has its paws on his chest, nipping at his jaw line, stubby little tail wagging vigorously. Another one is pulling at the hem of his shirt while two more grapple over his shoe laces. A little chubby blonde one is cradled in the crook of his metal arm, fast asleep.  
  
Bucky looks up when Steve comes in and he’s smiling, big and real.  
  
Steve feels thunderstruck. He crosses the room and sits in front of him, cross-legged. “Hi,” he says and knuckles the head of a dark brown pup that instantly crawls onto his lap.  
  
“Hi,” Bucky replies.  
  
Steve knows he must look dopey but he can’t control his massive grin, so wide it’s making his eyes hurt. “You look like you’re having a good time.”  
  
Bucky nods and scratches the chin of a little puppy tumbling over his legs. “Amelia says they’re all weaned. Ready for good homes.”  
  
“Does she now?”  
  
“I can’t keep ‘em all,” Amelia says from the doorway, behind Steve. “Alaskan huskies are good strong dogs. Perfect for keeping you company up here during the cold months.”  
  
Steve picks up the one in his lap, holding it under its tiny front legs and peering into its dark eyes. The puppy squirms and then strains its neck, tongue sticking out as far it’ll go so it can swipe at Steve’s nose.  
  
By the time they pull onto the dirt driveway of their property, the sun is getting low over the ocean. Steve carefully steers around the mud ditch from this morning and looks fondly over to where Bucky is asleep against the window.  
  
His head is tipped back so that Steve can see the soft underside of his jaw and how his hair curls behind his ears. In his lap, two exhausted puppies are cuddled together, little heads resting on Bucky’s stomach.  
  
Steve smiles as he parks the truck in front of their home.  


Summer comes on slow, like the rising tide in the cove. 

Steve measures time in how the pups grow and how little seedlings sprout up in their garden. He measures it in the repaired roof of the barn, getting the water tank working so they can actually have hot showers, and the solar panels are beginning to actually provide energy to the generator again. He measures it in Bucky’s smiles and soft touches, the way Bucky’s hair grows long around his shoulders and he starts braiding it back so it doesn’t get in his face when he works with the goats. Steve’s hair is long enough now that it flops around his neck and the tips are almost white blonde from days in the sun. 

He measures time by the way his chest starts to feel lighter and how the skin on the back of his hands turns dark with the sun; how new callouses start to form on his fingers: no longer fitting a shield, but fitting a shovel and a hammer. 

They have three goats now: a mama and two little babies that baah and hop around in the little fenced area they’ve built. Bucky loves sitting in there, with the pups tumbling in the grass and the little goats prancing. Sometimes, when Steve’s up on the roof and repairing shingles, he’ll look down and see him there and have to stop and just watch him. He’s so gentle with the small creatures, scratching their little heads and laughing as they flop around him. There’s a whole universe, Steve thinks, in the way Bucky strokes the ears of a baby goat.

They have a chicken coop in the barn with six hens and a rooster and Bucky has gotten good at pulling out eggs each morning. He’s named each one of the chickens and talks to them while he works, hay in his hair and dirt on his hands. 

While Steve’s been banging away at the house, Bucky’s been working in the dirt, first digging up the ground with a long trough and then shaping the little rows before carefully planting the seeds. Some of the crops needed to be started in a greenhouse and Ed points them to a woman in town with a huge greenhouse, just past town. She sells them little corn, watermelon, pumpkin, squash, and cucumber seedlings for their growing gardens. 

The work is hard and tiring and sometimes they work from sunrise to sunset, caring for the animals, tending to their crops, fixing up the house and the barn. They eat dinner together at their big table and Steve’s sunburned and Bucky’s fingernails are full of dirt. The dogs are passed out on the couch, exhausted from a day of tumbling after their humans. 

Bucky has named them Bambi and Dumbo. Dumbo is the splotchy brown pup that had crawled right into Steve’s lap. He has huge paws and huge, floppy ears that bounce like wings as he speeds across the long grasses. He’s eager and sweet, tumbling after Steve and Bucky with the eagerness of a new recruit. Bambi is the one that had fallen asleep in the crook of Bucky’s metal arm that day in the diner. He’s smaller and blonde, with paler, almost white fur over his chest and ears. He’s gentler than his brother and incredibly curious,unexpectedly nosing into whatever Bucky and Steve are doing while Dumbo is chasing after butterflies. 

After a little bit of hesitation, Steve uses the satellite phone from Natasha to start calling Peggy once a week. He gives the name of Peggy’s grand nephew to the nurse - but Peggy recognizes his voice instantly when she picks up.

“I got your note, darling,” she tells him. “I hope you’ve found happiness. You two were always happiest when you were near each other.”

He swallows around the lump in his throat. How did he get so lucky to have her in his life? “I miss you,” he says. 

She laughs, crusty and dry but still lovely. “I very much doubt that. I’m sure he’s keeping you well and occupied. Now, tell me everything.”

And, he does. They’re always careful to not use names or specific places, but he fills her in as best he can. It becomes routine: calling her once a week on Tuesday evenings and listening to all the gossip from the retirement home and the news of her large, happy family that are spread all over the US and the UK. 

Sometimes, he puts her on speaker and Bucky talks to her about bread making or the best ways to hide weapons under a nightgown. 

“Maybe you could come here someday,” he says as the weather turns warmer. 

She’s quiet. “We both know, darling,” she says (because she never uses his name on these calls), “that it wouldn’t be safe for either of us. I’ll not have you in danger on my account - not when you’re safe and happy.”

By June, a sturdy stone wall surrounds their property and Bucky has set up dozens of barely perceptible traps for any humans that come prowling around. Steve has been working in the cellar, fixing broken shelves and organizing their stores for winter.

In the very back, Steve hollows out a small part in the wall and builds an airtight hollow. He puts the Soul Stone in there and then plasters over it, until no one would know it was there at all. 

It never gets too warm, but the days are long and bright. In July, when they finally start feeling like they have a grip on all that needs doing, they start heading down the bluffs to their beach. The water is bitterly cold but the dogs stil dart in and out of the surf, leaping over the gentle swells and shaking water all over Steve and Bucky. 

The best days of his life, Steve decides, are the ones spent sitting on the beach with Bucky, watching the sun go down late at night while their dogs sleep in the sand next to them. 

They spend nights in their big bed in their big bedroom, ocean spreading out in front of them. The dogs sleep at the foot of their bed and Bucky sleeps in Steve’s arms. On the weekends, they pull heavy curtains over the windows so the early morning sun doesn’t wake them. 

Every morning, Steve goes running along the bluffs. He follows the line of the coast until it reaches where the highway bends down to it, and then runs further. Sometimes, when he’s ready to turn back, he’ll take off his shoes and swim out into the waves. The cool water feels amazing and he’ll float just beyond the breakers before swimming back and putting his shoes back on to run home. 

When the pups get a little older, they start joining him on the runs and Steve slows his pace down a little so they can keep up. He’s amazed, though, by how fast they can run and how strong they get as the summer progresses. 

The crops need more work as they mature and soon, they’re both spending most their day out among the vegetables, weeding and pruning and harvesting as the vegetables ripen. They have carrots, turnips, beets, peas, garlic, onions, and potatoes, along with all the quickly growing seedlings. Bucky orders a book from Anchorage on preserving vegetables and fruit, and soon they’re buying pickling and canning jars. Steve gets really good at milking the goat and that becomes his daily chore. He figures out how to start making cheese, and, often, they’ll both be in the kitchen together, bent over their separate projects. 

On some evenings, Bucky takes long baths, soaking in the claw foot tub with water and bubbles up to his chin. 

Steve loves when he gets out: when he towels himself off and changes into soft sweatpants and a sweatshirt and his hair is loose and wet around his shoulders and his skin is rosy from the hot water. He loves how Bucky smells of lavender and how Bucky is loose limbed against him when he sits down on the couch. 

Steve can pull him close, cradle his shoulders against his own chest and feel the solid heat of his body. He loves how Bucky’s hair grows long and curly. It’s not like anything he would’ve imagined in Brooklyn. The soft waves make Bucky seem otherworldly to Steve, something dreamlike and mysterious. He wants to run his fingers through it, to bury his face in it. 

At first, Steve almost feels shy about it - but he asks one night when Bucky is sitting on the bed, brushing out his damp hair. Bucky cocks his eyebrow, handing over the brush like he’s not quite sure but trusts Steve implicitly. Then, he sits on the floor in front of the fireplace between Steve’s legs, with the pups sprawled in front of him, as Steve brushes out his hair. 

The strands are soft and silky and start to shine in the firelight as the water evaporates. Steve starts at the bottom like he remembers his ma used to and works his way up in sections, gently working knots out with his fingers so he doesn’t tug at all. 

He feels when Bucky starts to go heavy against him, head tipping to rest on Steve’s knee.

The fire crackles, embers popping like orange fireflies, and Bucky’s hair is spread out over his thighs like seaweed. When all the tangles are out, Steve just runs his fingers through the strands. He presses gentle circles into Bucky’s scalp, tracing the rounded shape of Bucky’s skull. 

He ends up starting a loose braid. His ma had shown him how to braid her hair when he was small and the familiar pattern comes easily. It’s soothing.

“Mmm,” Bucky says, just as Steve has wrapped a hair tie around the end. “Oh. I fell asleep.” His hand finds Steve’s ankle and holds on loosely. He doesn’t move otherwise, body still cradled between Steve’s knees and heavy with sleep. 

Steve leans down and presses a kiss to the crown of his head. “Let’s go to bed,” he says and hauls Bucky up and tucks him under the covers. He gets into bed behind him and Bucky instantly rolls into him, tucking his head beneath his chin.

In early August, when they make their biweekly trek to town, Amelia announces she has a litter of kittens. Steve picks up their order at the store, and by the time he gets over to the diner, Bucky has already chosen two. They’re small and seem so fragile in Steve’s hands. He thinks about Dumbo and Bambi and how they roll and tumble about as they play. 

“Won’t they get hurt?” he wonders as the tinier one carefully climbs up his sleeve. She’s gray and striped and her eyes are big and green and he thinks he might be in love. 

Bucky is cradling the other close to his chest. “They won’t be this small forever, Steve. It’ll be fine.”

It turns out, Steve worried for nothing. The dogs adore the kittens, somehow understanding they’re babies and treating them with a delicateness that Steve hadn’t witnessed from them yet. Bucky names the kittens Clark and Cary. 

On a rare trip up to Nome, Steve gets a record player, a TV, and a bunch of DVDs at a yard sale. They’ve been stocking up on books and the shelves in the living room and the bedroom are all full. Bucky picks up some puzzles at second hand stores and then, just when they’re about to leave for home, shows up with a large bag from an electronics store. 

“It’s a Playstation?” he tells Steve, sounding a little unsure. “The woman said that everyone up here has one for the winter.” Winter, they’ve been told, is a time to stay indoors, even if they’re not snowed in, which they probably will be. 

Steve shrugs. They’ll at least have time to figure it out. 

By the end of August, the air is cooling off and the ground is getting colder. They work every day, harvesting the last of their vegetables, and their cellar is full of both goods purchased from town and the fruits of their own harvest.

In late September, the first snowfall comes, light and easy and melting as soon as it hits. They watch it together, standing on the porch, while the dogs chase after each other in the waning light. The days are short now, barely enough sun to last through dinner. 

Steve wraps an arm around Bucky’s shoulders, pulls him tight to his chest, and doesn’t think of Captain America at all. 

  
Bucky wakes up to Steve moving carefully around their warm bedroom. He cracks one eye and sees Steve’s running shoes dangling from one hand and both dogs prancing excitedly around his legs.

“Okay, okay,” Steve is murmuring. “Don’t wake Bucky, guys. I’m almost ready.”

“‘M awake,” he mumbles into the pillow, twisting just enough that he’s facing Steve. There’s a warm weight across his legs and he knows both cats are probably sprawled out there, blinking lazily at the dogs. 

Steve looks up from putting his shoes on and smiles. He’s soft in the thin morning light, hair darker and eyes bluer. “Sorry,” he says, still quiet. “But, look. There’s snow.”

Bucky twists his head back over his shoulder. There’s been snow for days now, huge falling flakes that fill the sky and stick for a few hours, vanishing into slush by midday. Now, though, the whole world is blanketed in heavy white, piling onto the branches of trees and covering over the rocks near the edge of the bluffs. Beyond that, the ocean is still wild and dark, white caps looking like mini snow flurries. The sky is still gray with clouds, hanging heavy over the horizon. 

It looks peaceful, serene. It’s nothing like Brooklyn in the snow and nothing like the perpetual freezing landscape of Siberia. This is something that Bucky’s only ever seen in paintings or books: still and calm and untouched. 

When he turns back around, Steve is gazing at him, eyes soft and full of wonder. His dark blonde hair is flopping over his brow and his beard is getting a little long. He looks nothing like Bucky had ever imagined when they were kids. 

“Go run,” Bucky tells him. Running is important to Steve. Bucky doesn’t understand it. The serum, even the half knock off version that Bucky got stuck with, means that working out isn’t necessary and Bucky luxuriates in that. Steve, though, wants to push himself to the limit. He likes feeling the burn in his chest when he finally runs far and fast enough to feel the edges of his own endurance. 

Bucky thinks it probably has to do with Steve feeling weak for most of his life. He likes testing his own strength, just to prove that it’s there. Bucky has plenty to prove, but how far and fast he can run is not one of them. 

Steve comes and sits on the edge of the bed. Clark abandons Bucky’s feet and crawls into Steve’s lap, batting at the strings on his sweatshirt. Steve dips his head and the kitten rises up on her hind legs and puts her tiny paws on Steve’s beard, staring up into his face. Steve’s hands are huge next to her little head but he’s so delicate as he uses his thumb to scratch at her little brown and gray flecked ears.

“Do you want to go running with me too?” he asks. “I think your legs might be too short.”

She purrs up at him.

“You could carry her in your pocket,” Bucky offers. With her sister gone, Cary has wandered up the bed and draped herself over the crook of his metal elbow. He thinks she likes the feeling of the cooler metal on her belly. 

Steve laughs and gently lifts the kitten and plops her on Bucky’s arm. “Maybe when you’re older,” he tells her. He leans down then and Bucky tastes toothpaste in his mouth as he presses a kiss to Bucky’s. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” he promises. “Hold down the fort.”

Bucky yawns. “Put coffee on before you leave?”

“Of course,” Steve laughs and stands up, patting his leg to call the dogs, and then they’re all rattling down the stairs, paws skittering across the rugs as they scamper after Steve. 

He flops back onto his pillow and closes his eyes. The fireplace has burned low and the heater hasn’t been turned on so the air outside the blankets is just a little nippy. With no more gardening or repair work to do, Bucky can afford to lay in bed a little while longer. 

There were no nightmares last night: a rarity. He’s gotten better at not waking Steve up every time they happen at least. They’ve shifted over the months: morphing from muddled dreams of the past to fears for the future. Jumbled visions where Hydra arrives in their cove and takes everything that Bucky has now before finally taking Bucky himself. 

Sometimes, he dreams Steve is dead on the floor while he is dragged away. Sometimes, he dreams Steve returns too late, only to find their home in ruins and Bucky gone. In those dreams, Steve morphs into the sad-eyed, heavy-shouldered Steve of the future. 

Had it really been only six months since he’d come to Bucky?

He’d been staying in a homeless encampment in D.C. when Steve had found him. At first, he told himself that he was there to finish his mission. It had been all over the newspapers that Captain America was in the hospital: the asset would need to finish the mission once he was released. He ignored the fact that he’d failed to kill Steve on the riverbank in the first place. 

Then, he told himself it was for reconnaissance. The museums were full of information about Captain America and Bucky Barnes. He had known he would have to leave soon, had been planning to within days; but, then, an older, wearier Steve had stepped from the shadows of the Smithsonian on his daily walk through. 

Bucky knew right away that it wasn’t the Steve he had fought. He’d let this Steve buy him coffee, sit with him on a park bench. Then, Steve had told him he had a way to restore his memories and erase the trigger words Hydra had left in his head. 

“Only if you want it,” Steve said seriously. “This is your choice. It might hurt a little. There are some bad memories in there, I know. But, there’s also good ones. And I… Steve. Your Steve. The Steve of right now who is looking for you. I can take you to him, give you a safe place. I don’t know what will happen then. It probably won’t be perfect. But I have to believe it’ll be better because you will be together.”

So, Bucky had agreed because even with only a handful of memories in his head, he knew that Steve, any Steve, wouldn’t lie to him. 

Downstairs, the door slams shut and Steve thuds across the porch before his footsteps go silent, muffled by the snow. The smell of coffee is beginning to waft up the stairs and he hauls himself up and rakes his fingers through his hair. 

Time to get up. 

He feeds the cats first, sets out food for the dogs when they get back, and finally pours coffee for himself. There’s an empty cereal bowl in the sink but Steve will eat again after the run, so Bucky pulls out enough eggs for both of them, letting them warm up on the counter while he drinks his coffee at the table. 

When the kittens are done eating, he shoves his feet into his boots and ties up his hair into a loose bun. The barn has its own heating system so he doesn’t bother with a coat, just traipses across the fresh snow in his t-shirt. 

The goats and chickens greet him cheerfully from their pens. The truck is now parked in the far corner of the barn - but the space was obviously designed for many more animals than they currently have so both the goats and the chickens have plenty of room to entertain themselves. He feeds them both first and then gathers up the eggs before grabbing the stool to milk the goat.

Princess is a gentle, quiet goat and she butts his hip with a friendly bah as he sets up his stool. He pets her flank. There’s something about goats, he thinks, as he watches her two young ones chew at the trough. 

Maybe, next spring, they can get some more kids. Bucky loves the milk and Steve has been experimenting with making cheese. He can imagine a whole herd of little goats, grazing on the grass and prancing about. They’ll need a bigger barn - but they have plenty of land and, Bucky thinks tentatively, plenty of time. 

By the time he gets back to the house, the sun has broken through the grayness and the sunlight is brilliant on the snow. As soon he steps through the door, the kittens wind around his feet with their little meowing voices. 

“Oh, you smell the milk, do you?” he says as Clark puts her paws on the bucket. 

She chirps at him and he sets the pail up on the table while he puts the fresh eggs away in the refrigerator. The goat milk goes into glass bottles, with a few tablespoons poured into a dish for the kittens. 

Steve gets back just as the eggs are steaming in the pan and he’s flushed and bright, pressing kisses to the back of Bucky’s neck. The dogs are flopped out in the living room and the cats are on the window sill and Bucky thinks that this is worth everything.

The snow keeps coming: piling up in great drifts that stack against their house, sometimes coming up to the windows. Steve faithfully keeps a path to the barn shoveled but their driveway becomes impassable by late November. 

They still try to go out with the dogs at least once a day. Steve has a pair of cross country skis that he uses in place of his morning run and they have snow shoes for shorter walks. 

At first, Bucky thinks of cryo every time his flesh fingers begin to get cold. That was always the first thing to freeze, when they stuck him in there. The cold tingle going up his fingers and through his chest and stopping his lungs even as he shuddered helplessly.

He avoids going outside, leaving the chores and the dog outings to Steve. The house stays toasty warm, thanks to the furnace and the fireplaces that Steve keeps stocked with firewood, and Bucky keeps a tea kettle on the stove, something to wrap his fingers around just in case. 


	3. Chapter 3

On a dark day in mid January, the short wave radio they keep in the kitchen starts spluttering. It’s snowing outside, though not as heavily as it had been earlier, and the sun is nowhere to be seen, even though it’s not too late in the afternoon.

Steve lifts his head from where he’s sitting sideways on the sofa, reading a thick history tome. He has a highlighter in his hand and he’s been muttering to himself for the last hour. One of the cats is pressed between his thigh and the cushions and both dogs are over his feet. 

Bucky looks back at him and shrugs. It’s not unusual for the radio to pick up long haul truckers or far out boats… but as winter has deepened, it’s gotten rarer. He turns back to the counter. 

The radio splutters again. “..eve… Ste...Come in.” It’s a woman’s voice and it sounds slightly familiar to Bucky, a little husky. 

He frowns, putting down the box of tea he’d just taken out of the cupboard. “Is that…”

Steve is suddenly behind him, looming over the radio, his shoulders hunched up around his ears and stretching at the seams of the long sleeved, blue t-shirt he’s wearing.

Jesus. Sometimes, even now, Bucky forgets how fast and quiet Steve can move. 

“Steve,” he begins but then stops when Steve holds his hand up. 

“C… Rom… Coordinates…” 

Steve’s face is like stone, eyes fixed on the radio, like he’s trying to decide something. A series of clicks come through and Bucky recognizes the cadence at the same time as Steve. SOS. 

“It’s Natasha,” Steve says. He snatches up the radio, pressing the talk button before Bucky can say a word. “Natasha?” he asks. “It’s… Butler.”

There’s a long pause and then, finally clearer. “Good to hear your voice, Butler. We have an SWA here. Permission to come aboard, sir?”

“Where are you?” Steve asks. The space between his eyes is furrowed. 

“In Normandy,” she replies. “Five minutes. Over and out.”

Bucky is heading for the supply closet where they keep their medical supplies before the radio even falls quiet. 

“They’re landing on the beach,” Steve says from behind him, like Bucky hadn’t been able to read between the lines of her quick code. His voice is clipped and serious and Bucky suddenly realizes how long it’s been since he’s heard the voice of Captain America. “Someone is wounded.”

Thank Jesus, Mary, Joseph that their first aid kit is borderline excessive. Bucky is pulling out the bandages and warming blankets. They even have a few IV bags and tubing. He starts laying stuff out on the table. 

Steve is pulling on his parka, grabbing a headlamp and a pair of gloves. 

“Do you want me to come with you?” Bucky asks. 

Steve looks up at him from shoving his feet into his boots and his eyes are dark. “No. Just in case it’s a trap. If I’m not back in ten minutes…”

“I’m coming after you.” 

Steve’s smile is thin and strained. “I was going to say to get down to the cellar with the animals. He said the stone would protect you.”

Bucky swallows and his insides clench. He doesn’t think about the hidden place in their cellar often. “He said it would protect us.”

Steve finishes with his boots and stands up. He steps over to Bucky and kisses him on the mouth, short and sweet. “I’ll be right back,” he promises.

The wind howls when he opens the door, a gust of snow dusting the entryway before it slams shut behind him.

Bucky presses his hands to the heavy table, lets his head hang down between his shoulders. He shouldn’t have gotten comfortable, he thinks. He shouldn’t have let himself believe that this could be something forever. 

He was made for violence and violence will never let him go. 

Steve clomps through the heavy snow. It’s up almost to his knees in some places, even though he had shoveled the paths clear this morning. The wind is making the trees shiver, sweeping with a lonely wail off of the edge of the cliff.

He can’t see much past the pale beam of his headlamp, but as he gets closer to where the trail starts descending down to the beach, a dark shape and blinking lights come in off the ocean. A quinjet.

He picks up his pace. If Natasha is coming here, it’s serious. He didn’t know she knew where they were - but he’s not surprised. He trusts her though: trusts her thoroughly. His boots skid a little on the slick path. The snow is lighter here, closer to the water, but the ground is still frozen solid, making it slippery and treacherous. 

He gets down to the sand just as the quinjet starts its descent to land. Sand and ice and freezing water kick up and he shields his face with his hand. His stomach is tight. What if it’s really bad? The nearest doctor is down in town and Steve could get there on his skis - but it would take a while. 

The engines cut and the back floodlight clicks on, almost a halo amidst the falling snow. The back ramp lowers and Steve pushes forward. 

He sees the flash of Natasha’s hair first. She’s holding someone up, her shoulder against a broad chest. Steve starts forward because he recognizes that face, the hunch of that shoulder. 

“Sam!” Steve runs up the ramp and takes Sam’s weight from Nat. Jesus. Sam. 

Sam opens his eyes and peers at Steve. “Hey there, Cap,” he mumbles. One side of his mouth twists up in a lazy smile even though his eyelids can’t make it all the way up. “You have a beard.”

“Are you okay? Is he okay?” Steve’s hands flutter over Sam’s middle. There are bandages around his upper leg, dark blood soaking down his pants to his ankle. 

Natasha has a smudge of blood across her forehead. “Got shot in the upper left thigh. He’s on the good stuff right now,” she says, “and I’ve packed the wound. He needs stitches, though, and a transfusion. You’re O negative, right?”

Steve nods. 

“‘m fine,” Sam tells him. He braces one hand against Steve’s chest. “Walk it off.”

“What happened?” Steve asks, hauling Sam up fully into his arms. Sam makes a grumpy noise but doesn’t protest. 

Her face is grim. “Hydra.” She hauls a duffle bag over her shoulder. “Are we safe parked here on the beach?”

“Yep. No boats this time a year and no planes that would be low enough to spot it.”

She doesn’t have a coat, he realizes, as she comes down the ramp.

“It’s a quick walk to the house,” he says. “Stay close.”

“Lead the way, Rogers.”

He goes slow, both because he doesn’t want to drop Sam and he thinks Natasha might be injured too. She’s favoring her left side as they head up the steep embankment. Sam passes out by the time they get up to the top of the cove, but his breathing is steady and his color stays good.

Bucky has the door open as they approach, golden light spilling across the white snow. He hasn’t changed out of his sweatshirt and sleep pants so he looks soft and rumpled, even as his hair is now pulled back in a sharp bun from his cheekbones. 

“Steve?” he calls as they get close. 

“It’s me,” Steve says. He hefts Sam up a little tighter. “Got company.” 

Bucky pushes the door open wider. His feet are bare and he’s keeping his arms loose and open though Steve knows there must be a gun at the small of his back. 

“I pulled down the blankets in the first bedroom on the left,” Bucky tells him, “and got one of the space heaters going. The dogs and cats are up in our bedroom. How is he?”

“Unconscious. We’re gonna need to do a blood transfusion.” Steve smiles tightly. “Thank you.”

Steve can feel Natasha at his back, knows she’ll be studying Bucky with those sharp eyes of her. He trusts her implicitly. She’s not going to hurt Bucky, won’t even treat him badly - but she won’t be easy with him at first. He starts up the stairs. 

“You have a lovely home,” he hears her say to Bucky, almost formal. 

Sam wakes up a little as Steve lays him down on bed in the first bedroom on the left. They don’t use either of the spare bedrooms much and this one has fishing tackle pushed into one corner and a broken lamp that Steve keeps meaning to fix. Bucky had put clean sheets and warm blankets on the bed, just like he’d said, though. 

“Where are we?” Sam asks as Steve props him up on the pillows, eyes a little hazy as he looks around the room.

“You’re in my house. You’re safe,” Steve promises. “I’m gonna check your wound.” Natasha had done a field dressing over the top of his pants, wrapping thick gauze around and around. There’s dark blood soaking through the fabric, but the top gauze is still mostly clean. There’s a pair of scissors, gauze, a bowl of water with a sponge set up on the bedside table already. 

Once a sergeant, Steve thinks as he grabs the scissors and starts cutting up the leg of Sam’s pants. 

“Need’ta buy me dinner first,” Sam slurs, but lifts his ass so Steve can pull the material out from underneath him and drop it on the floor. The fabric is stiff with blood, sticking a little as he pulls the pants away. 

Sam blinks slowly. His gaze is on the ceiling. “Nat said you’d take us in. She hadn’t even told me she knew where you were.”

Steve’s hands still as he’s gently washing up the dried blood. “I’m sorry. I had to…”

Sam makes a humming noise. “You get… one pass. I know what Barnes means to you. No more though, kay?”

Steve sits down on the edge of the bed and reaches up, presses his palm to Sam’s cool face. “No more,” he agrees. 

There’s a rap at the door behind him and Steve turns. Bucky is there with tubing and IV bags. He holds them aloft. “This’ll be fun. Haven’t done this since Europe,” he says. “Maybe 1944?”

Sam groans out loud. “Does not fill me with confidence.”

Bucky’s smile is small but real as he comes around the other side of the bed. Steve’s spent a lot of time talking about Sam. “If I was going to kill you,” Bucky says conversationally as he sits down and starts untangling the tubing, “I would’ve just done it back there when I ripped your wings off.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Sam grumbles but the tension around his mouth has eased a little. He blinks, seeming to focus a bit more. “Natasha?”

“She’s downstairs,” Bucky tells him softly. “I told her to take a shower while we took care of you.”

Steve settles next to him on the bed, sitting against the headboard while Bucky sets up the transfusion. 

“We’ll give it thirty minutes,” Bucky says, once the blood’s going. “Tell me if you feel woozy.”

“This is not my idea of a slumber party,” Sam says as Bucky takes over where Steve left off on Sam’s leg. His head tips over a little so it’s near Steve’s shoulder. “Tony’s gonna be mad when we don’t check in,” he mutters. 

Steve looks down. “Tony?’

“Stark, ya know?” Sam’s looking exhausted again, but his color is a little better - Steve’s blood already making a difference. “He looked for you,” he murmurs. “Nat told him you were okay but it’s Tony.”

Steve closes his eyes and imagines the impersonal, harsh halls of Stark Tower and Tony’s fast hands and his worried eyes. “I know.”

“He gave me your apartment in the tower,” Sam continues. His words are slurring a little. “Made me new wings. Hope it’s okay.”

Steve squeezes his hand. “I gave you the shield for a reason, Sam. We haven’t known each other long, but I know you’re a better man than me.”

Steve wakes up when the door opens, hours later. He’s still sleeping upright next to Sam and he has to blink a couple times to get his bearings. Natasha is there, in one of Bucky’s t-shirts and a pair of leggings she must have had in her duffle. Her hair is loose around her shoulders.

“Hey,” she says. “He looks better.”

Sam’s fully on his back, snoring just a little as he sleeps. One last IV bag is strung up over the bed and he’s not quite looking so sallow. The wound on his leg is cleaned and dressed and Steve knows there are neat stitches beneath the bulky bandages. 

“Yeah,” Steve says. He leans his head back against the wall and swallows around a dry throat. “You good?”

Natasha slides into the room, cat silent. “Your husband wrapped my ribs last night and tucked me into the other guest bedroom with one of your cats. You gave me the one with the better view I noticed. He’s walking the dogs, in case you’re wondering.”

Steve holds up his bare hand. “We’re not married.”

She gives him a half smile as she sits down cross legged in front of him. Then, her face goes serious. “I wouldn’t have come here if I thought there was another way. I would never put you in danger.” She’s strangely earnest when she says it, as if she’s not sure Steve will believe her.

He gazes back at her steadily. “I know,” he says. “I’m glad you came.”

“I started looking about a month after you left and I only found you,” she continues as if she’s unburdening herself, “because I know you. Tony couldn’t even find you and believe me, he tried.” Her head drops and she stares at her cuticles, picking at them a little. “You’re safe, is what I’m trying to say. I covered the information I used.”

Steve reaches forward and grabs her hand. “Thank you,” he tells her. “I trust you.”

Her face twists. “You shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have looked for you.”

He squeezes her fingers. “But then you wouldn’t have been able to find me now.”

Natasha’s throat works as she swallows and then she nods, pulling her hand back and tucking them both under her thighs. “I like your cats,” she says after a moment. “And your dogs. But I’m more of a cat person.”

“Makes sense.” Steve shifts on the bed. “You guys can stay as long as you want.”

She gives him a weary smile. “A couple days. Tony will lose his mind if we’re not back soon. I think you gave him separation anxiety, running off like that.”

“Sam’s part of the Avengers now?”

“What did you expect when you gave him the shield? Tony’s technically the leader - but Sam is the one that calls all the plays. He and Thor get along like a house on fire.”

“I can imagine.” Steve suddenly realizes he doesn’t know how much he should ask. Can he know what the mission was about? He doesn’t exactly have a security clearance anymore and his SHIELD employment contract was just a piece of paper as soon as the Triskelion fell. He loves his home, his new life - but with Natasha and Sam sitting here next to him, it’s impossible to ignore that there’s a war going on somewhere above his head.

“Hydra made off with a lot of the valuables in SHIELD’s storage,” Natasha tells him, reading his face as always. “Loki’s scepter among them. Apparently it’s powered by some sort of stone? Like the Tesseract, Thor says. We’ve been trying to track it down. That’s what Sam and I were doing.”

Steve is very aware suddenly of the stone in their cellar, glowing in its dark bag. It didn’t look anything like the giant cube of the Tesseract… but the glow of energy from it… He refocuses. “Any luck?”

She shrugs. “Before we got ambushed, one of the scientists at the base told us it had been acquired by a group in Sokovia. We’ll see. We’ve had a lot of dead ends.”

“You guys talk loud,” Sam mumbles and then blinks. “Ow.” 

Steve gets his arm under his shoulders when he tries to sit up, helping him prop further up against the pillows. “Hey - you feeling better?”

Sam nods. “Water?”

Nat tosses him a water bottle from the bedside table. “You better be okay,” she says. “I had to haul your heavy ass all the way up those stairs to the quinjet.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “You’re just jealous of my ass,” he says when he’s finished drinking. He caps the bottle and looks around. “Alaska, huh?” Then, he eyes Natasha. “You,” he says, pointing. “You swore to Tony you didn’t know.”

Natasha shrugs. “I know a lot of things Tony doesn’t know.”

Downstairs the door bangs shut and the dogs romp up the stairs a few seconds later, Bucky’s slower steps following. The dogs burst through the open door and Steve narrowly lunges in time to keep them off of Sam’s leg. 

“Hey, hey.” Steve pulls both dogs onto him. “Careful. We have to be gentle, see?” They kiss his face, slobbering all over him with their happy dog smiles. 

“They’ve been dying to see you,” Bucky says from the doorway. He still looks a little hesitant, even though he’d been the one to stitch up Sam’s leg the night before. “Had to basically drag them out on their walk.”

“Sam,” Steve says. “This is Dumbo and this is Bambi. Cary and Clark are around here somewhere.”

“They’re cats,” Natasha says helpfully. “They have a goat and chickens out in the barn too.”

“Yeah and if you stay long enough,” Steve says, “we’ll even let you milk the goat.”

Natasha and Sam end up staying for four days, which is how long it takes for Sam to be able to hobble more than a couple feet without stopping to rest. He’s healing well, a little cranky, but he’s himself and Steve knows he’ll be just fine. 

Natasha takes to farm life better than Steve expects. She accompanies him on the morning chores, milking the goats and tending to the chickens. She wears Bucky’s gloves and mucks the stalls while Steve sets out fresh hay. 

Sam’s limited to the house, but he makes the best of it. Steve gets him up and down the stairs and he spends the daylight hours downstairs. The first day, he stays on the couch, but by the second day when Steve and Natasha get back from the late evening walk, he’s parked himself at the kitchen table and is kneading dough while Bucky stands at the stove. 

“I’m telling you,” Sam is saying, “you’ve been doing it all wrong, Barnes.”

Bucky turns around from the stove and Steve sees that he’s grinning, loose and flushed. He has that spark in his eye like when Dugan or Falsworth would do something ridiculous and Bucky couldn’t wait to call them on it. 

It grows from there: Sam and Bucky bickering back and forth like they’ve been friends for years. They play monopoly on the second night and, while Natasha and Steve tie for first, it seems like Sam and Bucky have way more fun battling it out for last. 

Natasha is quieter but Steve notices how her shoulders loosen, how her hands relax, how she doesn’t flinch when Bucky comes up behind her. She’s trusting him. 

“Are you happy?” she asks as they sit in the loft on the last day, looking down at the goats and chickens. Clark had followed them out and she’s prowling in the rafters above them, occasionally raining dust down on their heads.

“You asked me that once,” Steve says, “in New York. After the aliens. You remember?”

“Mmm,” she says, kicking her legs back and forth in the air. “You looked at me like you didn’t know what that even meant. I didn’t know what to make of you.”

Steve lets out a breath. He can smell woodsmoke from the house, an incoming snow storm from the mountains, the salt air from the wild ocean. “I think I am,” he says. 

“Do you miss it?” she asks and Steve doesn’t have to ask what she means.

He hasn’t seen the shield, though he knows it must be on the quinjet. He wonders if it looks the same or if Sam has repainted it to make it his. He imagines going down to the beach, putting down the ramp, walking to where it hangs on the wall. He imagines taking it down and putting it on his arm. He imagines the feel of it in his muscles: how his back would straighten and his knees would lock and his chin would lift. 

Does he miss it?

“I don’t know.” He doesn’t even know if the shield is what he misses so much as the idea of it: the idea of being able to do the right thing, of being sure of his purpose and his mission. 

Steve thinks he may have lost some of that when Bucky fell the first time and the rest when those missiles blew up Camp Lehigh. 

“I don’t want to go back,” he adds. “Sam is doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.”

She hums. “But if we needed you,” she presses. 

“You can always count on me if you need me, Nat,” he says softly. “You know that. No matter,” he swallows. No matter how much peace he has found, no matter how much joy he takes in serene days - he would never turn his back if they needed him. He scrubs at a piece of dirt on his pant leg and thinks of the stone in his cellar and the power he doesn’t even understand. “No matter what,” he promises. “I will always help you.”

She relaxes and suddenly he realizes how still she had been holding herself, waiting on a knife’s edge. “I hope we don’t,” she says. 

They leave after just before dark and Bucky wraps up sandwiches for them to eat on the flight back. 

“You should visit in summer,” he tells them as he stands on the beach with Steve, just close enough so his shoulder brushes the front of Steve’s chest. There’s a light snow falling and it’s dusting his hair and his eyelashes. “We can have a bonfire down here.”

Sam nods and then smirks. “I’ll bring my mom’s bread recipe and show you how it’s really done.”

Bucky laughs and Steve loves the easiness in his shoulders, the way the corner of his eyes crinkles in a smile.

“Take care,” Steve tells them. “Be safe. Look out for each other.”

“Always, Cap,” Natasha says and then the back of the quinjet closes up. 

The engines start and Steve pulls Bucky back up the beach as sand and ice kick up from the wind. A fine spray of freezing water fills the air and the quinjet vanishes into a cloud bank. 

Steve puts his arm around Bucky’s shoulders, drawing him close. “Thank you,” he says.

“For what?”

“For letting them stay.”

Bucky shrugs. “You’re not the only one who takes in strays.”

He’s right. It’s a memory that Steve hasn’t brought up in awhile: Bucky with dirty cats and skinny dogs. He remembers how Bucky would carry water from the hot water spigot down the hall to clean them up in their steel bathtub. He remembers Bucky feeding them scraps from his own plate. He remembers Bucky taking him in when he’d been skinny and dirty and angry. 

Steve reaches down and brushes snow from Bucky’s shoulder. “You’re right,” he says. “You’ve looked out for me my whole life.”

Bucky slides their hands together and kisses him. “I like your friends,” he says. “I’m glad you had them.”

“Well,” Steve says and winces up at the clouds, “those are the good ones.”

The days get inchingly longer, temperature creeping up as the sun lingers a little longer in the sky.

Steve decides to start building a greenhouse in early March. Ed Jefferson gave him plans over the summer and Steve wants to be able to start their own seedlings this year. The ground is frozen but he gets a couple of large shovels and he and Bucky put their muscles to good use. 

They dig out a foundation near the barn while the dogs play in the snow, finding rocks that Steve tosses free of the area and racing around with them like they were buried treasures. 

By mid March, they can get the truck down the roads and Steve drives down to Anchorage to pick up panes of glass and concrete and tubing for irrigation. He gets a separate generator to keep it heated and seeds, some fertilizer, and wood for the frame and benches. 

The snow is fully melted by the time they're finished, though the ground is still much too cold to plant anything outdoors. 

Steve starts running again, much to the delight of the dogs. They’re fully grown and as fast as him now, big and sleek and agile. They race along the cliffs and swim with him into the ocean. He loves racing them, stopping abruptly and letting them catch him, rolling around in the grass in mock wrestling. 

Now and then, they leave the coastline and go running in the woods. It’s like an obstacle course: leaping over fallen trees and newly frosted streams. The dogs and he go up into the hills and down ridges, exploring the entirety of the land that is now theirs. Steve imagines a whole life here: Sam and Natasha eventually retiring in cabins near theirs. He imagines racing along this wilderness every day and finds that the feeling in his chest is happiness. 

By April, they’re starting to get the garden area ready for this year’s crop. They’re planning to double the size this planting season and Steve has to dig up a couple of dead old trees that are in the way. He leaves the big stumps near the house, to be chopped up into firewood. They need to expand the barn as well - Bucky wants another few goats to add to their herd and Steve can’t say no. 

It feels good to be working outside the house again, stretching themselves in the bright sunshine and sweating into the salt breeze. The grasses are growing back, the beginnings of wildflowers blooming on the edge of the bluff. Bucky starts picking bouquets, sticking them in tall pitchers and cups around their house.

Steve thinks it’s one of the most beautiful things he has ever seen in his whole life.

In late April, when the flowers have fully bloomed and the greenhouse is filled with young seedlings, Natasha calls again. 


	4. Chapter 4

“I suppose you haven’t seen the news,” Natasha says when Steve picks up. She sounds exhausted, a little hushed like she’s trying to make sure others don’t overhear her call.

“No internet,” Steve says cheerfully into the phone wedged between his shoulder and ear. His hands are damp with soap: he and Bucky had been trying to give Dumbo a bath after the dog had gotten into some of the marshy mud down near the creek. His t-shirt is soaked and there’s mud up and down his jeans. He grabs a dish towel and starts wiping himself off. 

Natasha takes a deep breath and the slight tremor on the tail end is enough to make Steve put down the dish towel.

“Nat?”

“There was an incident,” she says quietly. “We were tracking an arms dealer in South Africa and Bruce…”

Steve swallows and sits down at the table. “Is everyone okay?” 

“Clint got knocked on the head pretty hard. Sam managed to talk the Big Guy down before anyone died - but a lot of people got scared and a lot of property got destroyed. It’s all over the news. There was a girl with powers there… she made us see things. We need a place to lay low.”

Steve rubs a hand over his face. His beard has gotten long again, a consequence of being a low priority during all the building and planting of the last few weeks. “All of you?” he asks carefully. 

“All of us.”

“I’ll need to make sure Bucky’s okay with it,” Steve tells her. “I don’t want to surprise him. Can I text you back here?”

“I’ll be waiting,” she tells him. 

Bucky is bent over the tub, hair damp and curling around his neck. He’s laughing at Dumbo as the big dog pants and whines as the shower spray washes the thick mud down the drain. 

“It was Nat,” Steve says, even though there’s no one else it could’ve been. “They need a place to lay low. It’s the whole team, this time.”

It’s Thor and Bruce and Clint and Sam and Nat and Tony - mostly faces that he abandoned back in New York even before he left D.C. with Bucky. Will they even want to see him? 

Bucky turns off the water and grabs a towel, rubbing it across Dumbo’s back. “Stark?”

“Stark.”

Bucky tilts his head so his face is hidden behind a curtain of hair. “I needed to talk to him at some point,” he says. “I can’t hide from it.”

Steve swallows. “You don’t have to tell him now. In person. You could wait. It wasn’t your fault.” Anxiety is churning in his stomach. Tony has always been unpredictable to him: an unknowable planet of rocky terrain and hidden predators. Tony is biting and sensitive and mocking and kind and Steve leaves almost every conversation feeling wrong-footed and too big in his own skin. 

He wants to protect Bucky. But, he thinks, he wants to protect Tony too. What good is reliving the death of your parents? Steve had spent his life imagining the death of his dad on a cold European battlefield - how much worse would it be to have the killer in front of him?

Bucky is watching him, knowing as always. “I do, Steve,” he says. “Stuff like that, it festers. It festers in you. Why do you think you used to get in fights?”

Steve takes a deep breath, inhales so his whole ribcage expands. “I’ll give her the greenlight.”

### 

Steve meets them out on the bluff. He takes both dogs, feeling comforted by their presence and their tangible reminder that this is his life now. He is not an Avenger. He is not a soldier. He is home from war. 

Dumbo and Bambi howl at the quinjet when it lands near the tree line. The giant pines will provide a little bit of cover from passing planes. 

Steve stands with his feet apart, back to their home, and wonders if they’ll even recognize him. His beard had thickened and lengthened over the winter and his hair curls around the bottoms of his ears, the top almost white blonde from hours in the sun. He’s in dirty jeans and a thick flannel, looking like he was just digging in the dirt with his hands, because he was. 

The ramp of the quinjet lowers with a quiet hum and Natasha smiles at him thinly. Her hair is shorter than it was a month ago, a cluster of curls around her skull. “Hey,” she says, voice a little raspy like she’d been shouting. 

Tony appears at her shoulder and Steve takes a deep breath. The older man is grayer than he remembers, face pinched and fragile in a way that Steve doesn’t recognize. There’s bruising around his face and he limps a little as he comes down the ramp.

“So,” he says, when he’s just an arm’s length away. “You are alive.”

Steve tucks his hands into his pockets. “Tony. I’m sorry, I…”

“Is that your house? Quaint. Small. Natasha said you don’t even have the internet. You’re basically a caveman now, aren’t you.” He walks past Steve and then stops, hands on his hips, kicking at the dirt with his left foot. 

Steve swallows hard and looks back at Nat. 

She shrugs. “It’s been a long day,” she tells him. 

They’re all quiet as he leads them toward the house. The dogs sense the mood and stick close to Steve, butting against his legs and casting worried glances toward the newcomers. 

It’s surreal, Steve thinks, to have these people once again at his back. He’s missed them, he realizes, as he mounts the stairs and holds the door so Thor in his cape and Bruce in his oversized sweater can enter his home.

Sam pauses as he goes by, squeezes his shoulder. “Thank you, man,” he says quietly, for Steve’s ears only. “It’s been a rough one.”

Their living area, which normally seems perfectly comfortable with plenty of room, seems small and drab with six Avengers filling up the space. Thor stands awkwardly by the couch and Bruce hunches near the window while Tony inspects the TV. Clint is getting a glass of water at the sink and Sam is taking off his wings. Nat is still next to him and Steve doesn’t know if it’s because he needs the comfort or she does.

There’s a sound from upstairs and everyone’s heads swivel. Bucky is walking down the stairs. He’s changed from the work clothes he had been in to worn maroon sweatpants and a soft black cardigan that’s oversized even for his broad shoulders. His metal hand is tucked in the pocket of the sweater and his bare toes stick out the raggedy bottoms of his pants. He’d taken his hair out of its bun and it’s wavy around his shoulders. He looks soft, sleepy, and warm. He doesn’t look dangerous and Steve knows that he’s done this on purpose.

“Everyone,” he says and his throat feels thick because, god, he adores this man. He feels proud at how Bucky has recovered, has found himself, has clawed himself back from an assassin to someone who can come down to a room full of Avengers in bare feet without a weapon in sight. “This is Bucky.”

He crosses the room and takes Bucky’s bare hand, squeezes it firmly and then draws him close to his side. He presses a kiss to the side of Bucky’s head so there can be no doubts about what is between them. 

“Wait,” Tony says. “You’re… you two? You are?” He folds his arms and presses his left hand to his chin. “Well, okay then. I guess that explains some things. You couldn’t have filled me in, Romanoff? I would’ve brought a housewarming gift. Here I thought that Cap had just gone all macho mountain man with his bff but really this was more of a bodice ripper.” He looks around. “Wait, did everyone else know?”

### 

Tony is not what Bucky had expected, which, Bucky supposes, he should have anticipated given that his only knowledge of the man is based on Steve’s impressions. Steve was one of the smartest men that Bucky had ever known - but that didn’t make him immune from blindspots and misunderstandings. Steve is often an unreliable narrator of people who confound him.

Tony is quiet through most of dinner. All of them are, but there’s an oppressive weight to Tony’s silence. Bucky recognizes guilt well enough. There’s also something else there: something in the way Tony cuts his eyes toward Steve and then away, something in how he holds himself rigid whenever Steve looks in his direction. 

Steve had always talked about Tony like they were, at best, coworkers: people with a common mission who happened to be on the same team. That’s not what Bucky sees when he looks at Tony. 

So, after dinner, while Steve is washing the dishes with Sam and Clint, and Banner has gone up to shower, and Thor is staring morosely at the sky, and Natasha is curled up on the couch, Bucky asks Tony to go look at the greenhouse with him.

“Steve is the one who hooked up all the generators,” he tells him. “I want to make sure he did it right.”

Tony doesn’t seem that enthused but agrees. 

The sun is fading fast, throwing the last bit of gold red light over the green meadow and the shadowy trees, and the air is crisp with spring.

“You know,” Tony says as they cross the yard. “When I imagined where Steve had run off to, I never imagined it like this.”

“What did you imagine?” Bucky asks carefully.

Tony shrugs, kicks at the dirt. “Like a monastery. Self flagellation and hard beds and gruel for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He always seemed so,” he puffs up his chest and puts his shoulders back in a facsimile of parade rest. “Like he wouldn’t be okay with just settling down or growing his hair long.”

Bucky unlocks the door and doesn’t answer. 

“I offered to let him move into the tower, you know,” Tony says. “He kept turning me down.”

“Steve is stubborn,” Bucky says as he pushes open the door. The wet heat of the greenhouse slides out into the cooler air and he inhales deeply at the smell of fertilizer and green, growing things. 

“I’ll say.” Tony looks around at all the plants. “Okay, where’s that generator?”

Bucky sits down on a bucket. Might as well get it over with. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Tony folds his arms. “So this isn’t about a generator?”

“You know about what happened to me,” Bucky answers instead. 

Tony nods. “Hydra scrambled up your brain and used you as a murderbot for seventy years. Our very own Manchurian candidate. Then, somehow, magically, you’re all better. Was it Steve’s magical dick?”

“I remember most of it,” Bucky says, ignoring the last part. “It feels like it happened to someone else, though. I have nightmares, though they’re getting better.” He takes a deep breath. “I remember... in 1993, they sent me to kill your parents.”

Tony freezes and Bucky hadn’t realized how much the man moved until every single muscle stills. His mouth is a thin line and his eyes are fixed onto Bucky.

“I think… I think Howard recognized me,” Bucky continues. He doesn’t look away from Tony and keeps himself loose and still in the silence and warmth of the greenhouse. “I didn’t recognize them, though. It was fast.”

Tony stumbles a little but stays on his feet. “You killed my mom?” he says and he sounds wrecked. 

Bucky closes his eyes. “I did.”

“Does Steve know?”

“He does.”

Tony inhales and steps back, turns around so he’s facing the door. He wavers on his feet. “I can’t look at you,” he says after a long moment. “I know it’s not your fault. I know you were brainwashed. But I can’t… If I look at you, I might try to kill you.”

Bucky doesn’t move. “You would be justified.”

Tony makes a strangled, rough sound. “Then, Steve would kill me and then Bruce would hulk out and we’d all fall apart all over again. No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t want to kill you. Who…” he takes a deep breath that makes his whole chest expand. “Do you know who sent you?”

Bucky closes his eyes. “They woke me up in Siberia for that mission,” he says. “I could get the coordinates of the base. Vasily Karpov was the commander then. I’m not sure… I’m not sure if he was the one who initiated the order.”

“Karpov,” Stark repeats. “It’s a start.” He shudders. “I can’t… I can’t deal with this now. Not with homicidal AIs and witches running around. But, after, you’re going to help me and we’re going to figure out exactly what happened.”

Bucky doesn’t move from the stool. “I will,” he says quietly. “Whatever you need.”

“I’m going to go back to the house,” Tony says. His voice is getting thinner, tighter. “Let’s just… we’ll be leaving in the morning. Let’s just stay out of each other’s way? Okay? I need time.”

Bucky stays in the greenhouse when he leaves, stays until the sun finally slips under the horizon and the golden light fades from the greenhouse. The automatic UV lights click on and he stares into the shadows of the greenhouse for longer still.

When he finally goes back to the house, Tony is nowhere to be seen and Bucky goes straight upstairs and lays in a warm bath until his head stops hurting.

### 

  
Steve comes to bed late, creeping in long after both dogs and cats are sleeping curled around Bucky. He sits on the edge of the bed after he’s changed into sweatpants, hands on either side and staring out the window at the bright moon and the thick shadowy trees.

Bucky rolls over, reaches out one hand to press to where his spine is just a rigid line. He remembers, he thinks, when this was knobby and crooked. 

“You’re going with them, aren’t you?” he says into the darkness.

Steve bows his head. “What am I supposed to do, Buck?” he asks. “I’ll do whatever you tell me. If you don’t want me to go…” He trails off. The moonlight makes his skin look ghostly.

“A killer robot that’s trying to destroy the world does seem like an all hands on deck situation,” Bucky tells him. He doesn’t want Steve to go. He wants Steve to stay here: work on the greenhouse and run with the dogs and drink tea by the fireplace. He wants Steve to be happy, to be at peace. 

Bucky learned, even when he was just a kid, he doesn’t get everything he wants.

Steve nods. “I’ll go to Korea, with Nat and Sam and Clint. Tony and Bruce are tracking down whoever’s going after Ultron. Should just be a couple days.”

Bucky tugs at his arm and Steve turns, curling into him, pressing his face to the crook of Bucky’s neck and shoulder. Bucky can feel his ragged inhales and he runs his metal hand down his back, strokes the long, soft hair at the back of his neck. 

He could go too. Bucky considers it for a moment: picking up a weapon and getting into the quinjet, watching their home turn small as they fly away. They could set out food for the dogs and cats, ask the Jeffersons to look in on them. He could do it. He could fight again: watch Steve’s back. 

He thinks of Tony’s face when Bucky told him that he killed his parents. 

“I can’t go with you,” he says to Steve’s hair. “I can’t fight again… not yet.”

Steve nods. “I would’ve never asked you to.”

“I know.” Bucky presses a kiss to his forehead. He smiles to the ceiling. “So you come back to me. I’ll watch our dogs and our cats and take care of our goats and you save the world and come back to me.”

“I will,” Steve murmurs. His arms are wrapped around Bucky’s waist, squeezing firmly. “I’ll always come back to you.”

Bucky strokes his back. “I told Tony,” he says to the ceiling, keeping his eyes fixed on the long shadows of the trees. “About…”

Steve hums into his chest. “I figured. He was quiet. On edge.”

“Did I do the right thing?”

The quiet stretches around them and Steve twists so that the side of his beard scratches along Bucky’s bare chest. 

“I think so,” he says at last and Bucky can feel where his throat works over the words. “It’s not what I would’ve done. It doesn’t seem like the right time. But is there ever a right time?”

“No,” Bucky says. “There’s not.”

### 

Bucky keeps himself busy while Steve is off saving the world. He runs with the dogs, pulls weeds from the garden, starts mending up some weak spots in the roof of the barn.

The dogs and cats miss Steve, whining pitifully at the door in the evenings, like they expect Steve to walk in at any time. They flop dramatically over Steve’s spot in their big bed, staring at Bucky balefully as if he could bring Steve back for them.

“I know,” Bucky tells them, smoothing a hand over Bambi’s head and scritching Dumbo’s ear. “I miss him too. He’ll come back to us.”

He sits on the bluff on the second evening, watches the sun set over the dark pacific. Somewhere out there, Steve is fighting. He closes his eyes and smells the breeze.

On the third day, he takes the truck into town, dogs eager in the passenger seat. The sky is a clear blue and a soft warmth hangs in the air, even with the cool breeze coming off the ocean. Everything is bright, eager with the promise of coming summer.

They could spend decades, Bucky thinks, almost wistfully as he lets his hand hang out the window, learning how the seasons change here. There could be a million sunrises and sunsets and snow falls 

The first stop is the general store to pick up their latest order from Anchorage.

Ed Jefferson doesn’t ask where Steve is, though his eyes drift to the door behind Bucky, considering. 

“Crazy world out there,” he tells Bucky as he rings him up at the ancient cash register. “You see the whole mess in Sokovia?”

Bucky swallows. “Don’t keep up with the news much.” 

Ed shakes his head. “Sometimes I don’t know if those Avengers do more harm or good,” he says. 

Bucky flexes his metal hand in the single glove he always wears. “Yup,” he manages and carries the crate of seedlings, the bags of rice, and the new box of DVDs and books out to the truck. 

He sits in the cab for a long couple minutes, the dogs snuffling at him worriedly. He stares out at the ocean and wonders how many miles it is to Sokovia. If, somewhere, Steve is staring back at him. 

### 

The quinjet lands on the bluff a little before 1 am, only long enough to drop off two passengers, their belongings, and one long pine box. 

Steve helps Sam carry Pietro’s coffin off the quinjet himself, Wanda pale and quiet at his shoulder. She hasn’t spoken much since they’d left Sokovia. 

“Get some rest both of you,” Sam tells them, clapping Steve’s shoulder. “Thank you, Steve,” he says, quieter. “She needs quiet, peace. I know Tony thinks the new compound is where she belongs… but she doesn’t need more fighting.”

Steve nods and looks to where Wanda is standing at the edge of the lights. Her auburn hair is tossing in the ocean breeze and her pale face is turned up to the bright moon. “We’ll take care of her.” He hugs Sam. “Take care of yourself. And everyone else.”

Wanda doesn’t speak as the quinjet lifts off, though she draws near to Steve, leaning a little against his side. 

Steve wraps an arm around her shoulders. “I have a place he’ll be safe,” he tells her gently. “Tomorrow, I can show you around and you can pick out a good spot for him.” 

A light flicks on in the upstairs’ window as they walk up toward the house. Wanda carries her brother in red light, the tendrils glowing in the night. 

Steve takes her to the barn, shows her where the coffin can rest in the large walk in freezer they’ve built there. 

She puts a hand on the top of the coffin as they leave. “This is the longest I’ve been apart from him,” she says, the first words she’s spoken in hours, since she asked to go home with Steve. She inhales. “But, life goes on?”

Steve sets her up in the guest room. She doesn’t have much: the clothes on her back and a small backpack that she holds close to her chest as Steve shows her the bathroom and the closet. 

Bucky comes out of their bedroom as Steve is bringing her an extra blanket. He’s sleepy, hair mussed, and worn sweatpants low on his hips. “I thought I heard you,” he says and Steve drops the blanket to wrap him up in his arms.

He squeezes him, inhaling the scent of his soap and a little smoke from the fireplace and the mint of his toothpaste. There aren’t words in him at all, just the overwhelming sense of being home and his whole being finally settling into peace. 

Bucky squeezes back with equal strength, planting his face in Steve’s neck despite the rough, itchy collar of the flight suit he’s wearing. “God. I missed you.” Then, he pulls back a couple inches, far enough away to peer at Steve’s face. “You’re okay?”

“I’m okay,” Steve reassures and kisses him hard, grounding himself here, in their house at the very edge of the continent. “I brought someone with me,” he says, low enough that Wanda won’t hear. 

“Another stray?”

“One of the enhanced individuals Nat told us about. Her brother died… she,” Steve hesitates. “She needs some place safe and quiet. There’s a place for her at Avengers Compound when she’s ready, but I thought…”

Bucky brushes a thumb over his eyebrow. He’s smiling so gently that Steve almost feels abashed. “As long as the cats like her, I’m sure she’ll fit right in.” Then, he hesitates a little and asks, “Tony?”

“He’s okay too. He saved the world, again.” Steve exhales. Suddenly, he is so tired, exhausted. His bones are weighing him down.

### 

They bury Pietro at the tree line, a warm place, dappled by sunlight, with the smell of salt in the air. 

Steve digs the grave himself, while Bucky helps Wanda find a good, heavy stone for a marker. The ground is cold but gets almost frozen when he’s almost to six feet. The dogs chase the dirt clumps he throws up, until they get tired of it and spend their time chasing each other through the meadow. 

Bucky and Wanda return as Steve leaps out of the dug grave. A large, domed rock drifts behind them, like Pietro’s coffin had the night before, red moving across its surface like electric mist. 

They work together to fill in the grave, once they’ve lowered the coffin inside. Wanda eschews her powers for this part, using her hands and a small shovel to push large clogs of dirt into the hole. She sings a little under her breath as they do.

Steve can’t understand the words but Bucky seems to and after a couple minutes, he begins to hum along, singing snatches like the song is tugging at a long ago memory. 

Clouds are beginning to move in from the ocean as they finish, rolling slow and steady as the breeze begins to turn cold with a spring storm. Wanda doesn’t seem to notice, sitting quietly in among the leaves as Steve pats the excess dirt into a smooth mound.

When Steve sits back on his heels, she closes her eyes and the large stone she’d chosen moves, scraping across the forest floor and positioning itself at the head of the grave. It settles there, and then, with a tremendous crack, the front of it slides away, crumbling to the earth. 

In the perfectly smooth, flat surface that remains, red letters glow across the surface, sinking back into the gray rock to make a headstone. Pietro Maximoff, it reads, and then words in Sokovian. 

“Beloved Brother,” Bucky murmurs the translation from where he’s kneeling next to Steve. 

Steve swallows as the marker sinks a little into the earth, like it’s settling in for its long watch over this spot. It’s a good place, Steve thinks, listening to the distant sound of rain over the waves as the storm comes closer. Protected, quiet, beautiful. He reaches over and twines his fingers into Bucky’s. 

To be buried, together, in this place, he thinks as the rain comes and washes over them, would be the best end. 

### 

They walk on the beach that evening after dinner. It’s mostly dark, the horizon a dark gray with the last hints of sun. Wanda is taking a shower and the cats are all curled napping near the fireplace.

Steve holds Bucky’s hand and watches the waves roll in to the sandy shore and their dogs leap in and out of the thick foam. 

“I think I’m done,” he says, inhaling deeply at the end of it so the salt air fills up his lungs. “I don’t want to leave you anymore. I don’t want to go away and never come back.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything next to him and Steve is grateful. He squeezes Bucky’s fingers and thinks of all the years they have spent fighting. Above them, white pinpoints of stars begin to appear, one after another in the darkening sky.

“Maybe it’s selfish,” he continues at last. “But I feel peaceful here. Maybe more peaceful than I’ve felt in my whole life. I don’t need to fight anymore. If something happens, and it’s life or death, I’ll still go. But,” he swallows and tries to find the right words. “But, that’s it. I’m not going to go back. I’m not going to be Cap again. You don’t have to worry about me getting bored or antsy and going back to New York. This is it for me.”

“Okay,” Bucky says and then turns so they’re pressed chest to chest. He kisses Steve’s mouth, presses firmly. “I’m gonna hold you to that, Rogers.”

### 

Wanda fits into their little home seamlessly. 

The first days, she is quiet, mostly staying in her room. Cary and Clark begin scooting their way in, and Bucky has come up the stairs a couple times to see one of them sneaking out of the cracked door to her bedroom, looking back at him innocently. 

As the weather begins to warm in earnest and spring planting reaches a fever pitch, she ventures out more, sometimes making coffee before Steve and Bucky come downstairs or silently joining them for movie night, curling in the large chair by the window. 

Steve is a little quieter too, since coming home from Sokovia, and his sleep is disrupted by nightmares. Sometimes, Bucky will wake up in the middle of the night from his own dreams (which have thankfully diminished) to find him sitting by the window, staring out over the dark ocean. He tells Bucky what happened a week after they return, sitting by the fireplace in their bedroom, the dogs laying across his lap. He says it all swiftly, lowly, staring at the flames like he’s trying not to see the desperate faces of those left in the city. 

He tells Bucky of those long moments when there was no hope of escape for any of them. 

“I wanted to live,” Steve murmurs, reaching out to take Bucky’s hand. “For the first time, in as long as I can remember, I looked at danger and wanted to live. I wanted to come home to you and our home.”

In late May, Steve and Bucky come in from a long day of weeding and pruning and planting, and Wanda has made a thick soup from the last of their dried vegetables from the prior harvest.

“Borscht like my mother made it,” she tells them. “I used to sit at the table and chop vegetables for her.” Her mouth twists in something that might be the first smile Bucky has seen from her as she lays out steaming bowls on the table. The heat of the kitchen has flushed her cheeks and she looks healthy, more at peace. 

Bucky knows that expression: not healed yet, but beginning to mend. 

She begins to pick flowers from the meadow, tying them up in bundles and making bright bouquets from the tables and window sills. She dotes on the cats, playing with them on the floor in the evenings with bits of string and cloth. The dogs curl around her feet and she rubs their ears while she reads on the window sill. 

She starts working in the fields with them during the day, tending to the growing plants and the animals. When their mama goat gives birth, she crouches in the barn with Bucky for hours, petting the goat’s soft head as she births three beautiful new kits. 

Bucky shows her how to feed one of them and a bit more light fills her eyes at the baby life squirming in her arms. 

“I don’t know what I would’ve done,” she tells Bucky one afternoon as they kneel between green corn stalks, stripping away the dead leaves, “if Steve had not let me come here. I thought all there was in the world was pain and war. Here,” she digs her fingers into the dark dirt, lets the clods fall between her fingers, “there is life and warmth.”

Bucky wipes his forehead against his shoulder, at the sweaty hair plastered at his brow. He hasn’t cut it since they came here, he realizes. While Steve has been chopping his off with kitchen scissors whenever it crawls too far below his ears, Bucky has just been wrapping his back in increasingly thick buns and the simple braids he used to do on his sisters. 

“When I came here,” he tells her, “I barely knew I was a person. I wanted to be with Steve. I wanted to be better for him - but I didn’t know how. This place, though.” He lifts his face to the sun, closes his eyes so that all he can see is the bright orange on the back of his eyelids. “It reminds you of what living is.”

“Do you think you will ever go to war again?” Wanda asks. 

Bucky opens his eyes and looks through the stalks, to the barn where Steve is perched on the roof, pounding away at the shingles. He’s shirtless, broad shoulders turning brown in the afternoon sun. His hair is golden against the blue sky, almost glowing. 

“Sometimes,” Bucky says. “You don’t have a choice.”

In late June, they all go into town to pick up the new generator they had ordered and a whole boxful of clothes Wanda had picked out. Bucky is picking out some spices from the rack while Ed rings them up. 

“Don’t suppose you heard,” Ed tells them, eyes fixed on the register. “But, there was a ruling yesterday from the Supreme Court. Same-sex marriage is now legal in all the states.”

“Yeah?” Steve says, suddenly very still in Bucky’s peripheral. 

“Yep.” Ed looks up from the register and smiles, warmly. “Just thought you boys should know.”

Steve nods. “Always good to hear the news.” 

They head over to the diner after they’ve loaded up the truck. Steve has that look of deep thought about him: pinched lines between his eyes, more quiet than usual. 

“Can you imagine?” Bucky says as they cross the street, nudging him a little. “Never thought two fellas would be able to get married.”

“Hmm,” Steve says and runs a hand through his hair.

Wanda is in a booth near the window, Amelia sitting across from her. She has a small, black kitten cuddled against her chest, the tiny thing suckling on a syringe full of milk. 

“You’re a natural,” Amelia is telling her as they come up. “She likes you, I can tell.”

“Pawning off more animals on us, Amelia?” Bucky asks, sliding into the booth next to Wanda. 

The kitten is young, eyes still partially shut. 

“She’s the runt of the litter,” Amelia says with a smile. “All her siblings are big and fat and loud and this little girl keeps getting lost. She needs someone to do some mothering.”

Wanda looks up at Bucky, her eyes shining and Bucky knows they’re adding another cat to their household. 

They take the dogs for a walk that night, while Wanda is settling in with her new kitten. Cary and Clark are both enamored with the small baby; as are Dumbo and Bambi - but the dogs are too rambunctious for the tiny thing and Steve wants to get out their energy before they try to introduce them properly. 

The sun is just beginning to set, even though it’s well into the night, and they walk arm in arm over the green meadow, dogs racing ahead of them. 

“She seems happier,” Steve says. He runs a hand over his thick beard. Those two lines are still between his eyes, lingering since he heard Ed’s news. “You think we’re doing okay with her?”

Bucky shrugs. “She doesn’t need parents, Steve. She needs a home. This is a home.”

“Hmm,” Steve says again. He reaches down and picks up a long stick, flinging it out toward the mountains. The dogs take chase and Steve watches them. 

Bucky tucks himself deeper against his side as the breeze begins to turn cold. “You gave me a home, Steve. You’re enough. You’re more than enough.”

Steve turns them into the woods at the edge of the meadow, following the long path by Pietro’s grave and down to where the stream falls over the boulders and into a deep pool. The shadows get longer, golden light falling in sharp lines across the mulchy ground and wet rocks. 

The sound of water rushing and the wind rustling the trees are the only noise. Steve leaps down to the rocky beach and holds a hand back for Bucky as he hops down. 

“What if,” Steve says and now he’s looking at Bucky fully, staring at him so intensely that Bucky almost feels burned. “What if we got married? I know that’s not something we’ve ever talked about, but…” He steps back and tips his head up at the trees. “There is so much I couldn’t have imagined, Buck. You. This place. Wanda. Our family. Giving up the shield. So why can’t we have this? Why can’t we get married and live a quiet life here? We’ve fought enough.”

The sun flares behind his head and Bucky goes to him. This man, he thinks. Has it really been a year since they came here? “Steve?” he asks, because he wants to be sure. He wants to be sure this is real, that they both want this. 

“We can go to Anchorage. Wanda can watch the dogs and cats. Natasha and Sam can meet us at the courthouse. It doesn’t have to be a big wedding. I don’t want that. I want you and I want us to be together, with our real names.” Steve takes a deep breath and it seems to steady him, face clearing and firming with purpose. His eyes are bright like he’s about to start crying. “Buck, will you marry me?” 

“Yes,” Bucky says and he grips Steve’s shoulders tightly. Steve’s trembling a little, he realizes, as he presses their foreheads together. God, had he been worrying Bucky would say no all afternoon? “Of course, yes.” 

Steve lets out a gasp that ends in a sob and he’s hauling Bucky close, pressing their mouths together. “Oh, thank god,” he says to Bucky’s lips. “Buck.”

“Jesus, Steve,” Bucky says. “You’re it for me. You’ve been it for me as long as I can remember.”

### 

They go to Anchorage on the first day of July, leaving in the morning before it’s even light out. Wanda waves goodbye from their porch, the newly christened Chandler in her arms. 

(“It’s a C name to match her sisters,” Wanda had explained, “and Pietro and I watched Friends to learn English.”

“Friends?” Bucky said blankly and Wanda had added it to the list to order in the next Anchorage shipment.)

The drive down is mostly quiet. Neither of them have suits but Steve is wearing a neatly pressed white button down and his newest pair of jeans. Bucky is in a dark gray sweater and jeans. Wanda had helped him braid his hair today, doing a french braid that let the little short hairs curl around his ears. He’s even taken the time to shave.

Steve drums his hands against the steering wheel as they eat up the miles on the lonely highway. 

“I keep thinking it’s too easy,” Steve finally confesses after they pull off the highway to pick up some McDonalds for lunch. He’s eating his burger with one hand, holding the wheel with the other. “When has anything in our life been this easy, huh?” 

Bucky balls up his wrapper and stuffs it in the bag. “What’s easy?” he says. “We’re both almost a hundred years old. I have a head full of shit from Hydra. You used to be Captain America. We have a weird glowy stone in our basement that your future self dumped in our laps. If this is what you consider easy, Steve…”

Steve laughs. “Okay,” he says and his gaze on Bucky is warm. “Maybe not easy.”

Natasha and Sam meet them outside the courthouse, a city block surrounded by office buildings and far from the wild of their home. The sun is bright, though, in a cloudless sky that stretches above them like a promise.

Sam hugs them both and then pulls back, looking sheepish. “Just so you know, he figured out what was going on all on his own when Natasha was pulling strings to get your marriage license.”

Steve tenses.

Bucky looks over his shoulder and Stark is there, standing near the doors, with a tall redhead on his arm. He’s in a charcoal three piece suit, dark sunglasses covering his eyes, mouth pressed in a thin line. He looks tanner than he did three months before, the grooves of stress around his mouth a little easier. 

“Cap,” Tony says. “Terminator” 

The redhead elbows him in the ribs.

“Ow. Pep. The man killed my parents: the least he can take is a little name-calling between friends.” Tony takes off his sunglasses and meets Bucky’s gaze dead on. There’s still wariness there, but also something tentative, almost hopeful.

Bucky manages a small smile. “Thank you for coming, Tony,” he says and is almost surprised to find he really, really means it. 

Tony looks abashed for a moment and then rallies. “Well, I had to help a very important person get here too,” he gestures and Bucky, for the first time, registers the old lady with carefully curled silver hair leaning on a cane next to the redhead. 

He doesn’t recognize her at first but then Steve inhales sharply, darting forward. 

“Peggy,” Steve says, and sweeps the woman into a gentle embrace. 

She places a wrinkled hand on his back and her eyes twinkle at Bucky over his shoulder. “You didn’t think I’d miss you getting married, did you, darling?”

The courthouse has glaring LED lights and drab carpet. The chairs are hard and the walls are an ugly cherry paneling that the harsh lighting glares off of. The judge is rushed. 

None of it matters. 

What matters is the way Steve’s hand trembles a little in Bucky’s, how his shoulders are firm and wide. A long strand of hair has flopped over his forehead by the time it’s their turn to face each other at the front of the room. 

The judge starts talking and tears slide out of the corner of Steve’s eyes and Bucky remembers, a whole lifetime ago, when Steve cried at every wedding they attended in Brooklyn. 

“Sap,” he mouths and Steve smiles, even as his nose turns red and splotchy.

“I do,” Steve says.

### 

Nothing changes, except how everything is different. 

Steve wakes up to go on his morning run and his husband is there, snoring against his shoulder. Steve gets back from his run and his husband is drinking coffee at the counter, absently stroking the cat pawing at his chest. Steve still spends his evenings curled on the couch with his sketchbook, but now, his husband smiles at him from across the room. He can look down and see a slim gold band around his finger and then find the matching one on Bucky’s metal hand. 

Steve wasn’t ready for how it changed the shape of his life, even while everything had remained the same. He’d always loved Buck, but this… marrying him, binding himself to Bucky legally in a way that could’ve never happened if they had come home from the war together… it settles something within Steve, grounds him to 2015 in a way that nothing else has. 

He… no, they belong in the 21st century. They have created a life and a home that would’ve seemed a wild fantasy to them in Brooklyn. Even with death and Hydra and aliens, they have managed to survive and come out together. It is satisfying and liberating. They’ve won.

The summer is the most joyful Steve can remember. He spends time in the fields, in the barn. He builds things with his own two hands and watches their harvest mature and ripen. He watches Wanda settling, smiling more, laughing. 

She is sensitive and sweet and reminds Steve of Bucky’s little sisters. He can’t help but dote on her, buying her a guitar from Anchorage when she expresses an interest in learning, building her a window seat in the bedroom she claimed as her own so she could read and watch the sun set. 

In July, they add another three goat kids to their herd and Bucky spends hours sitting with them in the grassy pen, the cats prowling around him as well. All of them have names and Bucky knows all of their personalities. 

“We’ll need a bigger barn if you keep getting more goats,” Steve warns, already making plans in his mind to expand the barn.

Sam and Natasha come out in August and help with the harvest time. They spend the days in the field, bringing in their crops and sorting them into storage for the winter. In the evenings, they sit around the fireplace and watch movies and play board games. 

On their last night, just as the temperatures start to cool a little with the end of summer, they have a bonfire down in the cove and they all sit on blankets in the sand, watching the sunset and the sparks from the fire leaping into the air. 

Bucky sits curled against him, head resting on his shoulder and Steve lets himself imagine for the first time in his whole life, that he really can have peace for the rest of his life. He can have sweet, fruitful summers and cozy winters. He can watch Bucky grow his goat herd. He can have a home and love and health and happiness. 

A cool breeze blows in off the ocean and he kisses Bucky’s forehead and lets himself dare to dream that he’s made it. 


	5. Chapter 5

That fall, Wanda decides to enroll in online classes at the University of Anchorage - so Steve finally relents and asks Tony to install a full communications array at the cabin. By the time the first snow falls, they have a new office downstairs, in the small room off the living room they had been using for storage, with high speed internet and a cluster of shiny computer screens.

Somehow, a flat screen ends up in their living room, replacing the large television box that they had been using. Suddenly, instead of crates full of second hand DVDs from Anchorage, they have access to a massive library of shows and movies from Tony. 

“Pretty much any movie made ever,” Tony brags. “No more excuse to not know pop culture references, Rogers.”

Wanda and Bucky seem to get more of a kick out of it than Steve, binging through entire seasons of old TV shows as the weather turns colder and colder.

By December, the snow and ice comes in full force and they are once again cut off from the world. Wanda sets up a little Christmas tree, a tradition they had been eschewing when they had been on their own. The gifts they exchange are simple: Bucky knits Steve a scarf and Wanda a blanket. Wanda makes maple candy for both of them. Steve gifts them both portraits of them he painted himself. The dogs get marrow bones from the stores and the cats get handmade toys from Wanda and Bucky. 

In February, Wanda tells them she’s decided she wants to major in International Studies and join the Peace Corps out of college. “I want to do some good,” she says, curled into her armchair by the window. “I want to know that I am doing good, with my hands, not just using the powers that Hydra gave me.”

Spring creeps up slowly that year, the frost lingering in the ground even as the days start getting longer and Steve is starting to feel an itch under his skin: the sensation of something coming. 

When Sam calls on a cold morning in early April and tells him about something called the Accords, Steve finally knows why. 

### 

Bucky sits down in the armchair by the window. There had been rain this morning. He can see puddles of mud near the long grass and all of the flowers are shimmering with the lingering rain droplets. Why can’t the world just stay out there? He listens to Steve say goodbye to Sam quietly and focuses on inhaling and exhaling.

When he looks away from the window, Steve is standing in the middle of the room, running a hand over his hair. His shoulders are so tight and Bucky wants to go back to this morning when Steve was loose and easy in bed, when his hair was spread over his pillow and his eyes were bright. 

“Steve,” he says, because he doesn’t know what to say.

“I won’t let them take you,” Steve says. “If they… if they try to come for you. If they use this as an excuse… they won’t get you.”

Bucky hadn’t even been worrying about that. “If they come for me, they’ll be coming for you.”

“I’m not Captain America anymore,” Steve says. “I’m not leading the team. I’m not…”

“Did you read the text that Sam sent?” Bucky swallows. He hopes Wanda has her door closed tight. He hopes she’s not listening. “It doesn’t matter what we’ve been doing. We’re enhanced. You can’t just give that up. They can come and get us.”

Bucky swallows. They can put him in the chair again. They can take his memories. They can take this home, this life. Everything is so fragile, he realizes. 

Steve stares back at him and, then, shakes his head. “I’m going for a run,” he says quietly. “I need to think.”

Bucky nods and tucks his hands under his knees as Steve changes into running shoes and clomps out the door with the dogs. 

The email comes about 20 minutes later to their single secure inbox. Bucky thinks it’s an update about the Accords, so he opens it. 

It’s from Peggy’s nephew. 

She passed in her sleep last night. I’m sorry. 

He feels numb. 

Bucky makes tea, mixes up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. He lays it out on the table and sits on the couch with the cats until Steve comes home. 

When he walks through the door, Bucky has to tell him that Peggy is dead.   


### 

“I need to go, Bucky.” Steve doesn’t look at Bucky as he says it, focusing solely on folding a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt into his duffle. He doesn’t own a suit. He’ll have to buy one in London. “Sam will pick me up in two hours. We’ll fly to London, just stay one night and come back right after the funeral. I won’t even be gone 48 hours.”

“What about Ross? They’re signing the Accords tomorrow, Steve. What if…”

“Tony says he spoke to Ross. They’re going to be hammering out the provisions for weeks after the signing.” Steve zips up his duffle and then sits down next to Bucky on the bed. “I won’t be in any danger, Buck.”

Bucky doesn’t look convinced and Steve understands it perfectly. If it was Bucky going… Steve shies away from the thought. 

“I’ll be with Sam,” he repeats and reaches out to twine their fingers together. “I’ll be home before you know it.”

Bucky’s gaze is fixed out the window, on the bright morning sun. He’s stuck close to Steve since the news about Peggy came, held Steve when he cried at night, and pushed food into his hands for him to eat. “I should go with you,” he murmurs. 

“No,” Steve snaps. He tightens his grip on Bucky’s fingers. “We need someone here, with the dogs and Wanda. With…” He doesn’t say it but he knows Bucky will follow the direction of his thoughts. If something happens to one of them, the other has to be able to make sure the stone is safe. 

Bucky exhales roughly. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days and Steve can hear the slight rasp of his fingers as he rubs his jaw hard. “You gotta be careful, Steve,” he says. “I have a bad feeling.”

“I will,” Steve says and presses a kiss to the side of his head. “I promise.”

### 

  
After Steve leaves, Bucky can’t disguise his tension and he knows Wanda senses it. Bucky stays out in the fields long past when he normally comes in, trying to work to a point where he’s too exhausted to be anxious. 

They eat late - Wanda makes borscht for dinner and, instead of sitting around the table like usual, they eat in front of the TV, watching the seventh season of Friends with their plates balanced in their laps. She sits curled in the armchair by the window with the blanket she knitted last winter pulled over her legs. She keeps combing her fingers through her hair, eyes flicking between Bucky and the screen. Chandler is snuggled into her side, snoozing peacefully. 

Bucky can’t focus. Dumbo is flopped next to him and he strokes the big dog’s head almost obsessively. They haven’t been apart since that week Steve went to Korea and then Sokovia, he realizes, and, before that, they hadn’t been separated since the older Rogers had carried him into Steve’s Washington D.C. apartment. 

He looks down at where Bambi is sleeping at his feet and gently runs his socked foot over the dog’s back. They’re extra clingy whenever Steve is gone and Bucky understands it. 

It doesn’t feel natural, doesn’t sit right in his bones that Steve is out in London with the world growing increasingly hostile. 

“It’ll be okay,” Wanda tells him gently as the credits roll to yet another episode. “It won’t be too much longer until they leave London, yes?”

“Yeah.” Bucky checks his watch. It’s just after midnight. The funeral will be starting any minute, halfway around the world. Steve said it would go about two hours and they’d leave directly from the gravesite to get back to the quinjet. Maybe three more hours. 

Wanda nods. “Viz texted from Belgium. They’re getting ready to start the roll call for the vote.” She’s a little pale, Bucky realizes. 

He swallows, pushes down his worry for Steve. “I know it’s scary,” he says, “for people to be making decisions about you and you can’t do anything about it. But, Tony and Vision and Natasha… they’re all there and they’re all gonna do their best to protect you.”

She smiles, but it’s weak. “That is often not enough,” she says. “You and Steve… you are Americans. People know you. Who am I but a girl from Sokovia with no visa and no family?”

“Hey, no.” Bucky pushes forward a little, soothing Dumbo with one hand when the dog grunts unhappily. “We’re your family. Steve and I. Right? If they come for you, they come through us.”

Her next smile is more real. “C’mon,” she says. “This next one is one of my favorites. I don’t think either of us will be sleeping tonight.”

They watch two more episodes. Bucky does his best to stay focused. Cary and Clark are prowling the edges of the house, peering out the windows at the dark landscape as if the source of the tension is just out of sight. 

Wanda begins to drift off a little after 1 am. The television is on low and the fire is crackling. It would be perfect if Steve was there.

He should get her to bed, Bucky thinks. There’s no reason for both of them to sit up on a pointless and useless watch. He’s about to wake her gently and help her up the stairs when her phone pings in her lap. She wakes blearily and pulls it out from under the blanket to check it, covering a yawn with one hand. 

“Is it Vision again?” Bucky asks. 

Wanda freezes, hand over her mouth as her face goes pale and tight.

Bucky feels his own gut freeze in response. “What is it?”

“There’s been an explosion, just after they ratified the Accords,” she says. “Viz doesn’t say…” her hands are shaking a little on her phone. “I don’t…”

Bucky is already up, heading over to the satellite phone in the kitchen. Natasha’s number is preprogrammed but the phone rings in his hands before he can dial. Tony.

“Tony?” he asks. “Are you okay?”

“A little singed, Buckaroo,” Tony says and he sounds rattled, despite the nickname. “They blew the whole room. I have Romanoff and Vision - but there’s gonna be casualties. I can’t -” Sirens cut through the background and Bucky can’t hear anything but that for a moment. “Listen,” Tony says, coming back on, “I can’t get a hold of Sam. I know he’s at Peggy’s funeral so his phone may be off, but he needs to know. I don’t know if this is a coordinated…”

“I’ll call him,” Bucky says. “Steve doesn’t have a phone with him.” He hangs up and focuses on hitting the right numbers for Sam’s direct line.

God, what if this is an attempt to take out the Avengers? What if there’s already been an explosion at the funeral? Steve shouldn’t have gone. It had always been a bad idea. Or, Bucky should’ve gone with him, been there, and maybe… 

The phone rings and rings. 

Sam doesn’t pick up the phone. 

### 

  
The first time Steve has a hint something is wrong is as the choir is singing “It Is Well With My Soul.” It starts off with a single phone buzzing, somewhere in the row behind him. The owner silences it quickly, but then it starts up again almost immediately. Then, other phones around the chapel begin to buzz, over and over. He looks behind him and dark-suited men and women are trying to creep inconspicuously out of the pews and slide out the back of the church, phones already pressed to their ear. 

Whatever it is, Steve tells himself, resolutely facing front again, it’s not his responsibility. He’s here for Peggy. He’ll be flying home to Bucky in just a few hours. This is his life now. He’s retired.

The choir finishes the closing note and the ushers open up the back doors. Steve stands slowly, feeling every one of his decades. Peggy’s face is smiling from the large portrait by the coffin and he lets his gaze linger on it. 

“I’ll miss you,” he murmurs. He wishes he could’ve been at her side. He wishes he could’ve seen her more. He wishes she could’ve come to their little home in the cove and waded in the ocean with him. So many wishes. 

Next to him, Sam pulls his own phone from inside his suit jacket. “Shit,” he whispers. 

“Should I ask?” Steve asks. The church is slowly emptying and the sun is shining brightly outside. It’ll be beautiful at the graveside. 

“There was an explosion at the signing,” Sam says, keeping his voice low. “No word on casualties. Tony, Nat, and Viz are all okay. But, it’s bad. They’re saying it was an Enhanced.”

Steve winces. “This is gonna make the amendments more difficult for Tony to negotiate.”

“Yeah.” Sam is typing away at his phone. “Your husband called too… I guess Tony called him when he couldn’t reach me. I’m telling him we’re okay.”

There are sirens outside the church now, still a distance away but getting closer. Their pew has finally cleared and Steve makes his way into the center aisle. At the end, the doors are swung wide open and he can see the shapes of people milling out on the steps. 

“Do you need to go?” he asks, pushing his hands into the pockets of his pants. “Drop me off at Heathrow and I can make my own way back.”

“Your husband would tear my wings off for real, man,” Sam says. “I’ll get you on the quinjet and then catch a ride over with Sharon Carter. She was the one who spoke right before the choir.”

“I know who she is, Sam. I’m not senile.”

“She’s with the CIA now, on loan to the UN Joint-Terrorism task force.” 

Something in Sam’s voice makes Steve quirk an eyebrow in his direction. Sam and Peggy’s niece? Who would’ve thought. 

They step into the sunlight together. The sirens are loud now, coming just down the street. There are three black SUVs turning the corner and Steve wonders who they’re here to pick up. Peggy’s funeral had been full of old and current spies and government officials. 

Sam’s phone rings again and he answers as they start down the steps.

“Tony?” he says. “Slow down. What is it?” 

Steve pauses on the sidewalk. Their rental car is parked down the street. It’s a quick drive to the quinjet - Sam could be on his way to Brussels within the hour. 

Sam reaches out and grabs Steve’s forearm, phone pressed to his ear. “Are you sure?” he says into the phone and his eyes lock onto Steve and there’s something terrible in his gaze. 

“Sam?” Steve says, right as the SUVs screech to a stop right in front of them. 

Sam puts the phone down as men in black suits spill from the car. “Steve,” he says. “The bombing… there was a security video-”

“Captain Rogers? You need to come with us, sir.” A short blonde man stops in front of them, flanked on either side by men with guns. “If you please. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”

Sam steps between them, putting his hands out to put space between Steve and the man. “And who are you?”

“Everett Ross. I’ve been asked to bring Captain Rogers in for questioning. Purely a formality.”

“Uh huh. I’m sure.” Sam glances at Steve over his shoulder. “Where are you taking him?”

“And how is that any of your business?” Ross retorts back. “The Accords have been signed. You answer to me now, not the other way around.”

A crowd is gathering now: the Carters, passersby. Steve could break through them. He could run, but he eyes the twitchy men holding the guns around Ross, there’s a good chance they’d start shooting and Sam’s shield is back at the quinjet. The last time he was in London was in the 1940s - he’s not familiar enough with these streets to find an easy route.

God, Bucky, he thinks. I’m so so sorry. 

“Sam,” he says and touches his friend’s back. “It’s okay. I’ll go with them. Call Tony, okay? I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding. They’ll sort it out.” He smiles and it feels stretched oddly on his face. 

Sam turns around fully. “Steve,” he says and Steve sees the truth there. This might not be something they can sort out. Should we run? Sam’s gaze asks, steady and true. 

Steve knows Sam would: that he would fight his way out of here at Steve’s back, that he’d throw away the mantle of Captain America and become a fugitive, if Steve would just say the word. And, for a moment, Steve considers it. They could make it back to Alaska without being caught; pick up Bucky and Wanda. They could flee again, maybe to South America this time. They could live beneath the radar and let all the politics be left behind. 

Maybe, Steve thinks almost wistfully, there was a time he would have done just that: if he didn’t know what it was like to have a home and security and peace. If there wasn’t the thought of uprooting Bucky and Wanda or their dogs and cats and even the goats… he could leave it all behind. But, now, the only way out was through. 

“Yeah, Sam,” he says. “It’ll be okay.”

Sam holds his gaze for a moment longer and then steps aside. “No funny business,” he warns Ross. “I’m gonna be right behind you.”

“I’ll go with him.“ Sharon Carter steps from the crowd of onlookers. She’s still in a black dress but she’s swept her blonde hair back into a ponytail. Her blue gaze is steely on Everett Ross. “Sharon Carter. I’m with the JTU.”

Ross nods. “Fine by me. Just don’t interfere. Captain?” he gestures toward the SUV, the door already opened. “After you.”

### 

Sam calls Bucky, just as light is breaking over the mountains. “They took him to Berlin,” he says. “I’m on my way there with Tony and Natasha now. Tony has lawyers meeting us there.”

Bucky can hear the flat sound of the quinjet engines in the background. He’s sitting on their bed, in their bedroom, staring out the large window at the gray ocean and dim trees. The dogs are still asleep, though the cats are prowling the house somewhere. He’s cold but he can’t bring himself to light a fire, to put on a sweatshirt. What if Steve is cold too? 

He swallows around a dry throat. “Should I come?”

“No,” Sam says flatly. “With the way they grabbed Steve… you wouldn’t be safe.” He sighs, sounding exhausted.

It’s only been four hours since Sam called him from London with the news Steve had been taken for questioning; two hours since Sharon Carter had texted Sam that they were officially bringing charges against him for planting a bomb in the room the Accords were signed.

The security footage, after all, was unmistakable. At approximately three am in the morning, Steve Rogers, wearing a dark hoodie and jeans, slipped into a parking garage at the UN, used his old SHIELD credentials to get past security, and left a small timed explosive device inside the hollow front of the lectern in the room where the Accords would be ratified about seven hours later. He left the same way, the cameras catching his profile as he slid into a nondescript black sedan. 

Then, just as the ratification had been completed, the device had exploded. Twelve people were dead. Seventeen were wounded. The King of Wakanda was in the ICU. The entire world was desperate for justice.

Bucky has seen the footage. It’s not a crystal clear image - but the shape and face are right. It’s enough to arrest Steve, maybe even convict him. Whoever framed Steve had done a hell of a job. 

“Are they gonna let you see him?” he asks. “Can I talk to him?” Mist is rolling in off the ocean, slow shimmering in the morning light. He can see the swells just below it, breaking and rushing inward with white foamed-peaks.

“They better,” Sam says. “We’ll be there in an hour. They’re having some psychiatrist come and evaluate him. Tony is gonna try to get him extricated back to the States right after that. Then, we can talk about you coming out to see him.”

Bucky hangs up the phone, holds it loosely between his fingers. The whole world feels too large: too much space between him and Steve. It’s better when they can keep it small: when the whole world is their cove and the little town. 

They’ll get that back. Whatever it takes.

Bucky thinks about the stone in their cellar - about that long ago promise from the future. It will keep you safe.

The dogs follow him when he leaves the bedroom. He goes quietly down the stairs, as not to wake Wanda, who finally passed out an hour or so ago. The kitchen is cold and quiet, no coffee pot humming. Steve’s running shoes are sitting by the door, alongside his work boots and his jacket, just waiting for him to come home.

The cats are sitting by the window and follow the little parade with the dogs as he goes down the steps to the cellar. He flicks on the overhead light. Their stores are a little low after the long winter. Empty canning jars are lined up on shelves and burlap sacks are neatly folded, waiting for more dried corn and wheat and rice.

He has to move the standing freezer away from the wall. It’s heavy enough that he strains, sweat beading at his brow. He and Steve had moved it together last summer - it was much too heavy for anyone who wasn’t enhanced. Behind the freezer, he runs his hand along the thick planks that make up the wall. 

The sensitive sensors in his metal fingers feel the almost invisible indent and he presses down and the hidden compartment slides smoothly from the wall. The cats skitter around the shelves as he reaches into the little box and pulls out the dark bag.

It’s heavier than he remembered and he stares at the bag for a while, wondering if he should open it. Finally, he just slides the whole bag into his pocket and closes up the compartment, moves the heavy freezer back into place, and heads up the stairs again, summoning the animals to come with him. 

Whatever it takes. 

Steve will be coming home.

### 

  
“You disappeared over two years ago, Captain,” the mild psychiatrist says, scribbling with a pencil in a notebook. “Why don’t you walk me through what you’ve been doing during that time?”

Steve shifts. His muscles are starting to ache from being restrained in the same position for so long. “I don’t see how that’s relevant,” he says, a little hoarsely since he hasn’t had water since this morning. 

He’s let them push him around. He’s let them cuff him and restrain him and treat him like a terrorist. He will not, however, discuss what he’s been doing since he left D.C.. He will not let Bucky’s name cross his lips. He will not breathe a word of their home in Alaska. 

The psychiatrist smiles. “We’re trying to get an idea of the actions that led you to plant a bomb today. People rarely wake up evil.”

“I did not plant the bomb,” Steve repeats. “I was in London with Sam for Peggy Carter’s funeral.”

“Someone matching your description slipped out of your hotel at 11 pm before the bombing. That would’ve given you enough time to get to Brussels and back before the funeral.”

Steve shakes his head. “Sam will tell you. I did not leave the hotel. I didn’t go to Brussels. I didn’t plant the bomb.”

The psychiatrist scribbles more in his book. “Let’s talk about James Barnes,” he says. 

Steve stiffens. “Not relevant.”

“You must have been pretty upset when the Hydra files showed what had happened to him.”

Breathe. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Your previous mental evaluation is from 2013.” The doctor holds it up with one hand, dogeared with bright tabs marking certain pages. “Suicidal tendencies. Post traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety. Depression. Yet, you refused treatment.”  
  
Steve grits his teeth and doesn’t answer.

“Here’s how I see it,” the psychiatrist says. “In early 2014, you discovered your employer was actually the century old Nazi organization you died to stop. You found out your best friend, who had died in front of you, was actually a POW who had been brainwashed and tortured by said organization. Your best friend vanishes after trying to kill you. Two weeks later, you disappear as well. That sounds like someone vulnerable to radicalization.”

When Steve doesn’t answer again, the psychiatrist lays down his pencil and sighs. “I’m not here to convict you, Steve. I’m here to get answers. I’m here to make sure we don’t lock up a man who needs treatment. Will you help me?”

Steve closes his eyes, tries to visualize Bucky sitting among the flowers. “I want a lawyer,” he says.

“Where’s James Barnes? Were you with him?”

Something in the way he says it makes Steve’s stomach twist. He closes his eyes, leans his head back against the chair he’s strapped to. “I want a lawyer,” he repeats. His instincts are screaming at him to run. He could break free of the chair, maybe. He could make it through the door - but there are soldiers with guns and his friends… He forces himself to stillness.

There is silence for a long stretch of time. Steve keeps his eyes closed, pretends he can hear the wind and the waves and can feel the sun on his face, Bucky’s hand in his. 

“You know, Captain,” the psychiatrist says. “I used to think you were perfect. Untouchable. But, now, at last face to face with you, I can see that there’s a little green in the blue of your eyes. What other little imperfections are there? What other chinks in your armor are there for me to find?”

Steve opens his eyes, keeps his face very still as he stares back at the man. He registers the broadness of the man’s shoulders, the faintest hint of an accent, the way the man’s hands are calloused in a way a doctor’s would not be. 

“There will be no lawyer,” the man who is definitely not a psychiatrist continues. “You will not see your friends again. With my evaluation and with the power given to the UN Security Council by the Accords, you’ve been declared an ongoing threat to the security of the world and must be handled accordingly. You are a dangerous man, Captain.” He steps back and smiles, a shark smile. 

“What will it do to them, I wonder.” His voice is soft, almost sing-song, “to know they are to blame for your imprisonment - that if they hadn’t signed the document this morning, you would be free. Can you imagine how this will divide them? Blaming themselves and each other? A team like that can’t survive for long.”

Someone pounds at the door and Steve realizes his fists are clenched so hard that he can feel wetness trickling down the insides of his fingers.

The man nods at him. “Our time is up. Good luck, Captain. I think you’ll need it.”

He is taken to a helicopter. They blindfold him before they even leave the room, shackling his feet and arms together with something that feels like vibranium. 

They gag him too, though he has not said a word since the not-psychiatrist left. Someone sticks a needle into his arm and his brain goes fuzzy around the edges, muscles limp and heavy as they drag him from the chair and through cold hallways. 

He thinks, once, that he hears Tony’s voice from nearby, faint and desperate. He might even hear his name, but when he tries to lurch toward the sound, he is dragged away. The helicopter is on the roof, rotors already thumping. He can feel the wind in his hair, the sunlight on his face. He can smell a river nearby, hear the traffic moving below. 

They hurry him along and he turns his head to the West: the direction the sun is setting, the direction of Alaska, and the direction of Bucky. 

### 

Tony is the one who tells him that Steve is gone. 

Bucky sits at the kitchen table with the satellite phone and tries to breathe through the rising sickness as Tony brokenly explains how they were stalled with paperwork and protocols, how not even the lawyers could get access.

Sharon Carter had alerted them that Steve was being transferred again and Tony had made it to the route to the helipad, just in time to see Steve, shackled and blindfolded and gagged, being dragged toward a helicopter. 

“Why didn’t I bring my suit?” he now asks rhetorically, voice hoarse and Bucky doesn’t have the strength to comfort him. 

Once it was clear the helicopter had taken off with Steve onboard, Sam had flown after it with his wings and tracked the helicopter as far as the Atlantic before he had to turn back as night fell and visibility dropped. 

“I have FRIDAY analyzing all the available flight data, trying to figure out where they could’ve gone. A bird of that size couldn’t make it all the way across the ocean without refueling. We’ll find them.” Tony is talking way too fast and Bucky is mostly getting the gist rather than the individual words. 

Dumbo and Bambi have sensed his unease and are sitting at his side, eyes fixed on his face. Bucky reaches out and cups Bambi’s head, letting himself smile a little when the dog licks at his wrist. 

“Could they be taking him back to D.C.?” he asks. 

“I have Rhodey checking into it,” Tony replies. “Calling all his contacts. We’ll figure it out and have lawyers waiting there so they can throw the book at them.”

“What about Secretary Ross? Weren’t you working directly with him before?”

Tony goes quiet. “The Secretary hasn’t been taking my calls,” he says at last. 

Bucky closes his eyes. Of course. Once the Accords had been signed, Ross had what he needed from Tony. Had this always been the plan? Sign the Accords and use the first excuse to stick them in prison, without trial, without recourse? 

“I’ll call as soon as I know more,” Tony says when another few beats have gone by without a word. “You and the Wonderful Witch of the West keep your heads down.”

Bucky hangs up, reaches into his pocket and wraps his fingers around the orange stone in his pocket. Help us, he thinks. 

### 

The days that follow are indeterminable, one flowing into the next like they did in the early days after the Triskelion, when Bucky had barely even known his own name.

He walks the dogs. He eats three meals a day. He works in the fields because Steve will come home and they will spend winter here as they have done for the last two years. They will see the first snowfall together. They will sit by their fireplace. They will walk along a snowy beach.

Sam calls at least once a day, often joined by Natasha or Tony or Rhodes. There is no progress to be made. The Accords were signed and the agreements laid out within were clear. 

Steve has been labeled a hostile and the Accords authorized the neutralization of that threat by any means necessary. 

“He’s alive,” Sam assures him on one phone call, trying to be comforting. “They would’ve told us if he was dead.”

Tony grows more and more drawn as the days drag on, dark circles like bruises under his eyes and hair greasy. 

“He says it’s his fault,” Natasha murmurs over Sam’s shoulder. She’s pale herself, though still poised in a way that Bucky almost envies. 

Bucky bites at his thumbnail. “Is it?” he asks, a little meanly and almost instantly ashamed of himself. 

Sam swallows and squares his shoulders. “We have to face this as a team,” he says, but even his voice sounds worn, a shadow of what it had been. He’s on thin ice himself, since he still refuses to sign the Accords. They haven’t come for him - but he’s been asked to refrain from any missions and the press has not been kind. 

Bucky has had to stop searching the internet for news of Steve. There is nothing new and most of the articles are unwavering in their belief that Steve is a terrorist: a traitor who abandoned his country and was radicalized by groups unknown before returning to burn it all down. 

“I should be out there,” Bucky says on another call, staring through the screen at New York City where Tony is reporting out of another useless meeting with a senator. “We should be looking. We should be…”

“Searching where?” Tony bites back, voice a little hoarse. “This is a needle in a haystack. We’ve checked every offshore detainment facility the US has ever had. We’ve checked the onshore ones. Nothing. We’ve checked ships and submarines and planes. We’ve tracked Ross’s movements for 12 days and nothing. Where exactly should we be searching?”

Bucky puts his head in his hands and doesn’t answer.


	6. Chapter 6

Three weeks after Steve was bundled into the helicopter, Bucky dreams of the ocean. He dreams of choppy, dark water and a thick layer of clouds. There’s no land in sight, just thick rolling waves. It’s nothing like the peaceful wildness of the cove: something here is foreboding and heavy. 

At first, he’s floating above the ocean, drifting like the heavy fog. 

Almost without warning, he plunges downward, breaking the surface of the icy water and then sinking downward, dragged into the deep by something heavy and unstoppable. He’s sucked down and down and his chest goes tight and desperate. 

There’s no air, no light. In the dream, he struggles, kicking for the surface, screaming soundlessly into the depths. It’s no use. Then, somewhere below him, he sees something long and sleek: not an animal but a whole structure: circular and dark metal, lit by squares of light. A submarine? 

He stares down at it, even as the current pulls him closer. It feels dangerous. The ocean goes bright around him as he approaches and then, suddenly, he’s somewhere else.

Bucky is standing in shallow water, soaked to the bone, and an orange sky is above him, reflecting in the quiet rippling lake. 

He blinks, steadies himself. This is a dream. He takes a step forward. A man is sitting on a low bench, hunched over so his head is hanging between his shoulders. Bucky can just see his silhouette - but he recognizes the shape of the back. 

“Steve!”

He splashes through the water, staggering and almost falling in his haste. He goes to his knees in front of Steve, reaching out with both of his hands. 

Steve’s beard is gone, head shaved, lips dry and cracked. His eyes are hazy and it takes him a few moments to focus on Bucky, blinking like he can’t trust his own vision.

“Buck?” he murmurs and then shakes his head hard. “No… no. You shouldn’t be here. You’re safe. You’re safe. You can’t be here.”

“Shh, shh.” Bucky cups his head, kisses his forehead. “I’m with you. I’m here.”

Steve clings to his shirt, hauls him close. His hands are trembling. “This is a dream,” Steve says, after a moment. “Isn’t it? I’m dreaming.”

Bucky swallows. “Yes. It is.”

Steve nods. His eyes are clearer now. “You’re safe. You’re in Alaska. With Wanda.”

“Yes. We’re looking for you. We’ll find you.” Bucky strokes his cheeks. This is a dream but it feels so real. He wouldn’t dream Steve like this. He’s never seen him shorn and so pale - at least not since Steve was small and young.

“I love you,” Steve says, quietly. “I love you so much. Please remember that. No matter what happens. I shouldn’t have left.”

Bucky hums under his breath. “You’ll be back here soon.”

Steve smiles, but it’s pale and strained. “I don’t think I will,” he says. “I’m glad I can dream of you, though. It helps.”

“Where are you?” Bucky asks. If this is a dream, the answer won’t help, but something about this place…

“Ross called it the Raft,” Steve tells him. He closes his eyes. “It’s somewhere in the Atlantic, beneath the ocean. There’s no light. No air. Even if I got out, I couldn’t swim to the top before I ran out of oxygen. It’s too deep.”

Bucky swallows: this is something else he wouldn’t dream. “I don’t think this is a dream,” he says out loud.

Steve blinks, skin brassy under the orange sky: the same shade as the stone that is even now on the bedside table in Alaska. “What?”

“I thought I was dreaming,” Bucky says. “And I think I am. But also I think you’re here too. I don’t know how, but…”

“I thought this was my dream,” Steve says. He looks down at where their hands are joined. “What are you saying?”

The sky above them shudders, something loud and banging. 

Steve flinches hard. “They’re coming back,” he says, staring somewhere into the beyond at something that Bucky can’t see. “I’m going to wake up soon.”

Bucky is powerless to make it better. He digs his fingers hard into Steve’s hands, like he can keep them together by sheer will alone. “We’ll find you,” he repeats. “Believe that. Hold on for me. Stay alive for me.”

Steve smiles at him, then frees one hand from Bucky’s death grip to touch his face gently. “I hope this is real,” he says, barely above a whisper. “I hope we’ve gotten this one last moment. I love you so much, Buck. I’ve thought of you every second. I’d come back to you if I could. Please know that.”

“Steve,” Bucky says but then Steve is fading, vanishing into the orange world like mist. 

Bucky’s eyes burn and then the whole landscape darkens, turning black and white and then vanishing all together as he opens his eyes with a gasp. His bedroom ceiling is empty above him but an orange glow is spilling across his room. Bucky turns his head and the bag holding the stone, that he had left closed on his bedside table, is now open. 

The orange stone is floating in the air above it, rotating gently, casting orange waves along the walls and the ceiling like Bucky is deep at the bottom of the sea. The light is warm and the air smells salty. 

At his feet and along his side, the cats and dogs are all still asleep, undisturbed by whatever is happening. 

Bucky sits up and reaches for the stone. It comes easily into his hand, hot to the touch but not burning. The light shimmers on for several moments and then seems to draw back into the depths of the stone until Bucky is left holding nothing more than a pretty orange gem. 

It was real.

### 

“You said the Raft?” Tony asks in a video conference from New York. He’s in clothes that Bucky recognizes from the day before, rumpled like he slept in them. “And it’s under the ocean?”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just a dream?” Sam asks for probably the fifth time. He’s across the room from Tony, arms folded over his chest. 

Bucky sits at his kitchen table, fingers locked around his mug of tea. Wanda is walking the dogs but the cats are tumbling around their large tree nearby. The day is warm for Alaska. If Steve was here, they’d be down at the water, foregoing their chores for the day to romp in the waves with the dogs. 

But, Steve is not here.

“It wasn’t a dream,” he repeats. “I would…. It was different. I don’t know how to describe it.”

He still hasn’t told them about the stone. He knows he should, but something is holding him back. Fear, maybe? That they’ll take it from him and tell him not to use it to find Steve? That the stone is so much bigger than his wish to bring Steve home?

They’re not wrong. The stone is probably meant for more than dream sharing - but Bucky knows he also won’t give it up as long as Steve is lost - not if there’s any chance the stone will help bring Steve home. 

Tony sighs. “Well. We have no other leads. So, it’s worth a shot.” His fingers clack across his keyboard. “How’s the kid?” he asks after a few seconds of silence. 

Bucky rubs his face. “She’s having nightmares. But, so am I. We’re surviving .”

It’s a lie.

“Okay,” Tony says. “FRIDAY has found a mention of a top secret project referred to as The Raft in the DoD budget two years ago. The stated purpose is deep sea exploration.”

“Does it have a location?”

“I’m going to have to dig deeper. Somewhere in the Atlantic? Maybe.” Tony’s face furrows. “There has to be someone who knows more. I’ll ask around.”

### 

Bucky dreams again three nights later. This time, he gladly sinks into the ocean, kicking downward with the current until the large metal structure comes into view again. The swirl of water sucks him in and then, he’s in the orange world again, sitting this time in a few inches of water. 

Steve is kneeling just an arm’s length away and Bucky falls into his arms, clinging as tightly as he can. Steve’s fingers dig into his back, so hard it almost hurts. 

“You’re back,” Steve breathes. 

Bucky presses a kiss to the side of his head. “We’re still looking,” he promises, “we haven’t given up. Tony has some leads.”

Steve nods but, when he pulls back, his eyes are desperately sad. There are fading red marks on his face and he’s even paler than before. “I’m just glad to see you,” he says and cups Bucky’s face with both of his hands, like he’s drinking him in. 

“Is Ross there?” Bucky asks. 

Steve shakes his head. “Ross hasn’t been back… not since the beginning. I don’t think he wants his hands to get dirty. It’s this… well, he says he’s a doctor, but I don’t think he is. Zemo. His accent is Sokovian.”

Bucky frowns.”Sokovia?”

“His family died, on the outskirts.” Steve looks down. “Hit by the falling rocks when the city came down. Our fault.”

“It was Ultron’s fault,” Bucky says. “Not yours.”

Steve shrugs. “He blames us - wants to ‘rehabilitate’ me and destroy the Avengers.”

“Rehabilitate? What does that mean?”

Steve smiles wanly. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he says, after a moment. “Tell me how Wanda is doing. And the dogs and cats.”

Bucky swallows hard. “Steve…”

“Buck.” Steve takes a shaky breath and grabs his hand. “You’re looking for me. I believe it. You’ll find me. But, right now, I need something good to hold onto, something that’s far away that I can go to when… well, when I need to be somewhere else.”

His heart is breaking. A memory is dredged up, buried under years of pain and loss and everything that came after. Bucky remembers sitting on the floor of a dank cell in 1946. He remembers tilting his head back against the wall and closing his eyes, as rats scurried around him, and going back to Brooklyn. He’d pretended he was walking up the doorway to their flat, visualizing each creak in the narrow staircase and all the water stains on the walls. He would imagine opening the door to their apartment and Steve would be there, sitting at the table and sketching. The kettle would be going and there would be a record playing. Home. 

Bucky strokes Steve’s cheek and says, “The dogs went exploring down the creek yesterday. It’s kind of marshy right now and they ended up covered in mud. Cary and Clark have been teaching Chandler how to bat at their ears when they go running by. Wanda is getting pretty good at making bread. She’s been baking a lot. You’ll have more than enough to eat when we get you home.”

Steve huffs a little. “And the crops?”

“Looking good. Corn’s coming in really nicely and bushes down in the grove are filled with berries. We’ll have lots of jam.”

“To go with the bread,” Steve agrees. He closes his eyes. “I can smell it,” he says. “The berries and the bread and the dogs. You.”

Bucky clings to him. “Me?”

“Mmm. You right after you take a bath with that fancy shampoo you keep making Ed buy in Anchorage. How your hair is always so soft and shiny and sometimes you let me brush it out for you and the smell gets all over my hands and it’s like I keep a part of you with me all the next day.”

Steve opens his eyes and he’s staring at Bucky like this is the whole world. “I wish I was there,” he says. “I’ll do anything to get back to you, Buck. I swear.”

“I know. I’ll do anything to get you back with me.” Bucky tries to force a smile. “Any day now. We’ll be busting down the door. Just hang on.”

“I wonder if this happened to the other me,” Steve says quietly. “If that’s why he was so sad.”

“If it did, he survived it. And you will too.”

A loud banging echoes over ahead again and Steve looks up into the sky. “That means they’re coming for me. More time with Dr. Zemo.”

Before Bucky can say another word, the orange world vanishes around him and, once again, he wakes up in their big bed, alone. Next to him, the orange stone pulses with light before settling back onto the bedside table. 

### 

Sam comes out three days later. The press won’t stop hounding him and Homeland Security has a tail on his car. So, he leaves New York in the quinjet on a Tuesday, lands in Seattle under the guise of a security meeting, and then flies up with just his wings after night falls. It takes him sixteen hours and he’s exhausted and wind burned by the time he lands in the front yard.

“They’re even watching my mama,” he says, a little bitterly as he sits in front of the fireplace after he’s taken a shower and changed into clean clothes. “I needed a break.”

Bucky nods. “I’m glad you came,” he tells him. 

“Also, I have something for you.” Sam reaches into his pocket and pulls out a plain gold band that Bucky recognizes instantly. “Steve gave it to me, just before they took him. I should’ve gotten it to you sooner. But, somehow, I thought…” Sam coughs and looks down, turning the ring in between his fingers. “When it was in my pocket, it was like he’d be coming back at any minute.”

Upstairs, Steve’s boots are still sitting just outside their closet door, one half fallen onto the other. Bucky could put them away.

“I get it,” he says, but still reaches greedily for the ring. He rubs the smooth metal between his fingers and pretends it’s warm from Steve’s skin and not Sam’s pocket.

Wanda brings out tea and bread and sits on one of the overstuffed chairs with Chandler curled next to her. “Any news?” she says, asking what Bucky has been afraid to ask.

Sam sighs and rubs his face. “We looked up that name you gave us from your dream. Zemo? He was a Sokovian special defense expert. He’s been consulting with the UN on top secret projects since last summer.”

Bucky flinches. He hadn’t told them what Steve had said about the man’s accent. “Where is he now?”

“He’s based out of Berlin but, as far as Stark can tell, he hasn’t been in Europe since Steve was arrested. We got a flag on his passport and we’re looking at all flight manifests. If he goes anywhere, we’ll find it.”

Bucky wants to believe it and Sam must see it on his face because he sets down his tea and leans forward.

“We’re trying, Bucky. Natasha is out there busting balls and Stark is digging through the data with FRIDAY and Vision is looking through walls, or whatever it is he does. We’re trying.”

“I believe you,” Bucky says. “It’s just…” He pulls at the sleeves on his sweater, trying to figure out how to say it without making it an accusation because he knows none of this is Sam’s fault. “None of this would’ve happened,” he finally says. “If the Accords hadn’t been signed.”

Sam sits back. “I think about it every damn day. If the funeral hadn’t been that day. If I had gone to Brussels. If I hadn’t let them take Steve. If I’d argued more with Stark. If I’d told Ross to shove it the day he first came to the Compound.”

Wanda flinches a little and Sam drops his head into his hands. 

“Sorry,” he says after a moment. “I just… I never saw eye to eye with Stark on the Accords and it’s like all my worst nightmares are coming true. Clint isn’t answering anyone’s calls, you know? I can’t even blame him. He has a family to think about - and if they’re willing to grab Steve in broad daylight off the street…”

“Then who knows who’s next,” Bucky finishes. He looks out the window at where the sun is moving down toward the ocean from its peak. “Do you think it’s going to come to that?”

Sam smiles tensely. “This is probably the safest place on earth for us,” he says, gesturing around the cabin. Off the radar, quiet. Steve did good.”

### 

Two nights later, Bucky dreams again. 

He dreams of the ocean and the underwater prison. He dreams of the orange world. This time, though, Steve isn’t there. The lake is empty and the sky is still. All Bucky can hear is the sound of his own breathing.

“What does it mean?” he asks the endless expanse. “Where’s Steve?”

The orange light seems ominous in a way it hadn’t before, cloying and oppressive. He slogs through the water, like if he can just walk far enough, he can find Steve. 

“He’s not here,” a voice says at last and he spins around. 

Natasha is there. Except, it’s not Natasha? She’s older, hair long and blonde at the end, loose around her face in soft waves. She’s sitting cross legged on a bench that hadn’t been there just a few moments before.

She smiles at him. “Hi, Barnes.” 

Bucky looks at her closely. She reminds him of the other Steve, he realizes. There is something ancient and sorrowful in her eyes, in the lines on her face. 

“You’re from the other timeline,” he says after a moment. “From the future.”

She nods. “I am. I was the one who told Steve to take the stone to you. When he returned it to this timeline. I saw what losing you did to him, over there. Every single time, it broke him a little more and that made our whole team fracture. So, I thought, if there was one way, any way, to make a timeline better than ours was, it would be making sure you two found each other again sooner.”

Bucky shakes his head. “What is it? I still don’t…”

“It’s called the Soul Stone,” Natasha tells him. “In my timeline, it was used for something terrible - but, here, the path is already different. The stone can be different. It wants to be different.” She smiles at him. “It is different. The stone spent generations alone and, whenever it was used, it was used to take lives and minds, to steal souls. You and Steve have been the first owners who have just let it be.”

“We didn’t even know what it was.” Bucky thinks of how the stone sat in Steve’s duffle bag, and then in their wall, and lastly, now, on his bedside table. “Can it get Steve back?”

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t work that way. It’s trying to protect him in the way it knows how: by bringing him here, keeping the core of him safe.”

“So why isn’t he here now?”

She looks away. “They’ll be moving him soon,” she says, instead of answering. “They’re getting impatient. You’ll need to be ready.”

Bucky feels his stomach clench. “How? How do I get ready?”

Natasha stands up and puts her small hand to his face. “I didn’t know you well,” she says. “Our paths never aligned in a time where we could be friends. But, I knew you through Steve. He’s always believed in you. You are his north star. He’ll always come back to you.” She stands back. 

Tingling starts in his fingers, like he’s about ready to wake up. 

“Take the stone with you,” she tells him as the sky starts to fade to gray. “It’ll help him and keep the team together - don’t let them fall apart.”

Bucky wakes up to pounding on his door and then Sam bursting through, sleep rumpled and with wide eyes.

“Tony called,” he says as Bucky sits up in bed. “There’s a quinjet. Took off from the middle of the Atlantic six hours ago - five passengers on board. One of them is Zemo and another is an unnamed high risk prisoner.”

Bucky is scrambling up, making the dogs lift their heads and stare at them curiously. “Steve?”

“FRIDAY says one of the passengers is running hotter than normal, so we think so. They’re headed for Siberia, should be landing in thirty minutes. Tony and Natasha are already flying here in a quinjet.”

“Siberia?” Something niggles at the back of Bucky’s mind. “Why Siberia?”

Sam lifts his hands and shrugs. “Tony said something about an old Hydra base, maybe?”

Hydra.

Bucky’s stomach twists further and turns sour. He remembers snow and ice and dank stone walls… prison bars and…

“I need to get ready,” he manages. “I’m coming with you.”

Sam frowns. “Steve would want…”

“I’m coming,” Bucky growls. “Wanda can stay here and keep a lookout.” He thinks about Natasha in the dream and about Steve’s pale face under an orange sky. “I need to do this. I can’t wait here, Sam. Not again.”

### 

The sun hasn’t even fully risen when Sam and Bucky meet the quinjet, the entire cove still hushed with the gray dawn. Wanda’s hair is in a half up ponytail and she is yawning around her sleeve as she tells them goodbye.

“Bring him home,” she tells Bucky, her eyes flaring red for just a second like she can make it true. 

“I will,” Bucky promises. He’d pried back one of the panels in his wrist during his shower and slid the Soul Stone there, nestled safely between the gears and wires. 

The flight suit he’s wearing is the one Steve wore to Sokovia and it’s tight around the waist and a little big around the shoulders - but it smells just like Steve, still. His hair is pulled back tight in a bun and he shaved his face clean this morning. He doesn’t look like Hydra, he thinks. He looks like Steve’s husband.

“They landed two hours ago,” Natasha tells him as they take off, holding out a picture of a tablet with a desolate and snowy base. Her hair is scraped back tightly from her face and her widow’s bites are already on her wrists. “There’s no one there but the people who arrived in the quinjet. It looks like the base has been abandoned for a long time.”

Bucky frowns. “There were… I think I was there. Back in the early 90s. They were working on making more super soldiers. I think?”

Natasha is zeroed in on him. “You think?”

“I know. The serum didn’t work all the way and they couldn’t control them, not like…” Bucky can’t finish. Not like me. “They put them all on ice.”

“So they could still be there?”

“It’s possible.” Bucky looks down the length of the quinjet to where Stark is sitting in the pilot’s chair. He hasn’t gotten up once, not even to greet them. “Is he okay?”

Natasha’s face doesn’t move. “He’s fine. He wants to get Steve back.”

Sam shifts next to him and Bucky wonders if he’s not getting the full story here - if Sam had left on rougher terms than he’d imagined. 

“We have to be all in this together,” he says. It’s something Steve would say, Bucky thinks. Then, he realizes, no: it’s something Bucky would say. Steve was good at the powerful speeches and getting everyone pointed in the same direction. Bucky had always been the one who was good at soothing over the little disagreements. He was the one who wanted everyone to be friends and worried over the petty squabbles between Dugan and Dernier. He was the one that remembered people’s birthdays and favorite foods. 

Tony’s shoulders stiffen and he finally turns around. “I know it’s my fault, okay?” he says, sharp and bitter. “I know you all blame me. I was the one who pushed it. I was the one who said sign it now and ask questions later. I know. I’m trying to fix it.”

“I don’t blame you!” Sam bursts out. “But, at a certain point we have to realize that trying to play along with these people is going to get us all disappeared. You want to go to Washington. You want to talk it out. There’s no talking.”

“And, if we don’t try to work with them, they’ll just take you like they did Steve.” Tony stands from the chair, taking a few steps toward them. “I’m trying to fix it. I’m here to help. I just don’t know…”

“I’m just saying,” Sam says, a little quieter. “Maybe there’s no fixing it. Not anymore.”

Bucky glances at Natasha and she’s very still, face blank. He thinks of the Natasha in the Soul World, weary but peaceful.

He swallows. “This is what they want,” he says, at last. “They want us disagreeing and distrusting each other. They want us to be fragmented soldiers, just waiting for their command. But, we’re not. We’re a unit, a team. Maybe that means all of you have to move to Alaska with Steve and I. Maybe it means we have to move somewhere else. But, us - that’s not broken. Not yet, anyway.”

Sam inhales, rough. “Yeah,” he says at last. “Yeah.”

Tony nods and, while he doesn’t say anything, Bucky thinks it may be a start.

### 

Siberia is freezing in a way that feels familiar in Bucky’s bones, thick flurries swirling through the air that muffle the sound and color of the world. 

They set down a half mile from the base and make the trek in under the cover of a fast falling darkness. The landscape is desolate, devoid of people or weapons.

“Are we sure this is the right place?” Sam asks as they follow Stark along the edge of a canyon wall. His wings are on his back and the shield is on his left arm.

It’s the first time Bucky has seen it since the helicarriers and he’s surprised at the fondness in him. It’s not Steve’s shield anymore… but Bucky thinks Sam wears it very well.

“This is it,” Stark assures through the mechanical mask of Iron Man. “The base is below ground. Maybe a hundred feet? There should be a… Ah ha!” He points.

Bucky squints through the snow at two steel doors embedded in a small hill of snow and rock. One of the doors is propped open. “Think they’re expecting us?” he asks, and unslings his rifle from behind his back. 

Sam grimaces. “Stark, you’re on point. Natasha, take the rear. Barnes, stay close to me.”

“I’m not a civilian, Wilson,” Bucky says under his breath as they approach the open door. 

“I know,” Sam says back. “But Steve would never forgive me if something happened to you.”

The air goes instantly still when they get inside the base. It’s still freezing but the wind is only a distant howl beyond the doors. Tony switches on a headlight and sweeps it over the circular interior.

It looks abandoned: bare concrete walls and overturned scaffolding with rusted metal machinery. A small elevator sits open at the other end of the room.

“Is there another way down beside that?” Sam asks, gesturing with the shield. 

“This way.” Stark leads them down a narrow hall, which opens up to deep silo with lattice like fire escapes lining the dark walls. “It’s a long way down. What is this, an old nuclear bunker?”

Bucky follows him down the rickety stairs. “I think… it was old when they brought me here. Maybe as far back as the forties. There was,” he hesitates, “stories about what they did here, even before me.”

“What kind of stories?” Sam asks.

“Mind control. Experiments. This is where Hydra did things they didn’t even want the KGB to know about.”

“Sounds like a good time,” Stark mutters. 

Natasha murmurs something in Russian and it sounds like ghost stories to Bucky’s ears.

They hear no sounds and see no one the whole way down: not even rats or bugs. The deep shaft narrows a little as they descend, growing darker, if possible, the further they get from the light. 

“FRIDAY says she detects heat signatures on the bottom level,” Stark says. 

The bottom level is dank and freezing, half frozen puddles on the ground from corroded pipes. Old machinery has been shoved to the side, tracks in the dust like it had been moved recently. At the end of a narrow hallway, green light spills and they follow that down, creeping slow and quiet, even though they still can’t hear anything. 

The hallway expands into a large cavernous room and Bucky sees it instantly. 

He hadn’t thought about the chair in months, shoving those memories to the very bottom of his mind. His first weeks in Alaska had been filled with nightmares of the chair: of the electricity surging through his nerves and erasing his thoughts, erasing Steve. The one in D.C. had been destroyed: Steve had whispered that in his ear one of the first nights and Bucky has clung to that thought. 

Bucky should’ve known there were more. 

The chair sits in the middle of the room, in between large tanks that Bucky knows held failed super soldiers at one point. There is a limp figure inside the nearest one, slumped over with a bullet hole in a pale forehead. But, he can’t focus on that. The chair is large and black, dark cables trailing from it like tentacles. 

Zemo stands next to it, a pair of wire framed glasses on his face, no weapon on him.

Sitting in the chair is Steve. He still has the bite guard in his mouth, though he’s sitting partially upright, head shaven bare just like it had been in the Soul World. His eyes are glassy, dazed, and Bucky remembers that expression deep in his own chest. The air smells of burning hair and flesh and there’s two red marks on either side of Steve’s forehead, around the clamps still in place. The chair is humming.

Bucky can’t look away, can barely breathe. It’s a nightmare, he thinks. He’ll wake up in just a moment and be back in Alaska with Bambi laying over his legs and Steve snoring next to him. Wanda will be downstairs putting on coffee and the sun will rise and… 

It’s not a dream.

“Ah,” Zemo says. “You finally made it.”


	7. Chapter 7

“I have dreamed of this moment,” Zemo says. “I have studied all of you. It’s amazing what you can find with the proper motivation. You see, I could’ve killed you months ago. In your tower, Mr. Stark. In your mother’s house, Captain Wilson. In your safe house in Maine, Ms. Romanoff. In your happy home in Alaska, Bucky.” Zemo’s mouth turns around Bucky like it’s something distasteful. 

“That would’ve been too easy.” He smiles a little. “Did you know I was on the phone with my wife when she died? Crushed by one of the falling rocks from Sokovia. My little son was in the car seat behind her. My father was driving. They were trying to get away. I heard my son scream. Do you know what it’s like? To live with that?”

Tony is shaking his head stepping forward. “Steve was just there to help. He didn’t create Ultron. I did. It’s me you want.”

“You’re right, Mr. Stark. It is you I want.” Zemo’s eyes are wide and wild as they rove over the group of them standing there. “I want you to feel what I felt: to know the one you love is suffering and be helpless to stop it. And, more than that, I want to destroy the Avengers, keep you from ever interfering again.”

Natasha darts forward from the side, almost too fast for Bucky to even see, but Zemo twists away, pushing at the remote he’s holding in his right hand. The chair hums louder and Steve shouts in pain, the burning smell intensifying as the clamps around his head crackle. 

“Nice try,” Zemo says. “But as Bucky will tell you, this is a very delicate procedure. A heavy hand and Captain Rogers won’t remember how to even tie his own shoes. He’s already gotten quite a bit.”

“Nat,” Bucky says around a dry throat, pleading, even though he doesn’t even know exactly what he’s asking for. 

Steve is trembling in the chair, even as the crackling fades. He doesn’t move, though, doesn’t even try to get up, though Bucky can see the restraints around his wrists have been loosened. 

Sam steps forward. “What do you want?” he asks. 

Zemo smiles. “To see an empire fall.”

He starts speaking then, not in English or even Russian, but something that Bucky recognizes as Sokovian from listening to Wanda sing to herself in the garden. He knows a little of it: she taught him and Steve vocabulary in the evenings during the winter as a way to pass time.

“Moon,” Zemo says in Sokovian. “Forest. Voicemail. Car. Falling.”

“What’s he doing?” Tony asks. 

Steve is squeezing his fists tightly and his neck is strained, ligaments standing on end. His face is twisted, eyes squeezed together like each word is paining him. Why…

A memory surfaces: sitting in the same spot Steve is now, another man reading a list of words, and all the noise in Bucky’s head fading until all that was left was…

“Avengers. Frost. Gravity. Sunlight.” Zemo looks right at Bucky and his mouth turns upward just a little. “Cove.”

“No,” Bucky whispers. There is something burning in his metal hand, just under the surface. The Soul Stone, he realizes. 

Zemo lays a hand on Steve’s shoulder, almost gentle. He takes the bite guard from his mouth and pushes a button so the metal restraints retract fully, clamps loosening from Steve’s head. “Captain,” he says.

Steve is staring straight ahead and Bucky realizes there are tear tracks on his cheeks, fresh and still flowing. “Ready to comply,” Steve says in Sokovian.

Sam throws the shield and it takes Zemo full in the chest, knocks him across the room. Bucky hears something crack and Zemo howls, clutching at his leg. The shield ricochets off of him, bounces against the far wall - but, before it comes back to Sam, Steve snatches it out of the air. He holds it on his arm, staring down at it with an expression of faint puzzlement. The loose gray scrubs he’s wearing hang loose around his lean frame and Bucky realizes he’s barefoot.

“Steve?” Tony asks.

Zemo gets up on his knees. “Kill them,” he shouts.

Steve moves. 

Natasha is the closest to him and he grabs her by the throat, lifting her like a ragdoll, even as she clamps her legs around his neck, twisting away like an eel. His eyes are cold and blank, devoid of recognition.

“It’s brainwashing. It’s not him,” Bucky calls. He throws his gun away and charges forward. There’s no way he’s going to shoot Steve so, instead, he rams into him from the left, taking him out at the knees.

Steve’s grip loosens on Natasha and she rolls away. 

Bucky grapples with him on the ground, trying to get his metal arm around Steve’s neck. “It’s me,” he says even as Steve tries to head butt him. “It’s me. Steve. Steve!”

He can hear Tony’s suit powering up. If they can get Steve restrained, they can get him out of here, take him home. Bucky managed to come back, to heal. They can…

Steve twists to the right when Bucky expected him to go left and gets just enough leverage to punch his knee into Bucky’s chest. The force knocks him backward and Steve goes with him, landing on top. His head gets the ground and Bucky sees stars, vision blurring.

A moment later, Steve’s fist cracks across his cheek and hot pain flares up his face, mouth filling with blood. “Steve,” he chokes before the fist comes down again.

He can’t get his hands up. They’re pinned under Steve’s knees and he’s stuck. Darkness creeps in at the corners of his sight as Steve rains blows across his head.

Then, the weight on top of him vanishes and Sam is there, standing over him with both wings outstretched, the shield back on his arm. 

“Don’t hurt him,” Bucky wheezes. “Don’t…” He coughs and splits, blood filling his mouth from his torn cheek. He blinks and sees Stark grappling with Steve.

“No, don’t get up,” Sam says. 

“Gotta…” Bucky thinks both cheekbones must be broken. He can feel them moving under his face. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. They brainwashed him. They…” He staggers upright and Sam grabs him by the shoulders. 

“No - Stark has the best chance to do this without hurting him.”

Steve is going after Stark with his fists, slamming against the bright red and gold of Iron Man and Bucky can see the metal actually bending, denting under the force of his blows. Stark is clearly on the defensive, blocking Steve’s punches when he can but he’s not using his repulsors or striking back, dancing out of the way instead of going for the killing blow.

“Cap,” Stark is saying. “C’mon. You know me.” 

Steve isn’t stopping.

“We’re gonna have to knock him out,” Bucky realizes. “We’re gonna…” 

There’s a crash from above and a dark shape leaps from the ceiling, landing on Steve’s back. The figure yanks Steve backward, away from Tony, and throws him across the room. 

“Steve!” Bucky shouts. 

The dark shape is a man in a sleek black suit with silver streaks, Bucky realizes. He’s tall and broad, just as broad as Steve, and he stalks across the room like a giant cat.

Steve is pushing himself to his knees, shaking his head like he’s dazed from a blow. 

“Don’t hurt him,” Sam says, like he knows whoever it is.

Steve lunges and the man in the black suit lifts something that Bucky can’t quite see, pressing it to Steve’s chest, purple light flaring like a star from it. Steve freezes mid-swing, almost hanging in the air for two long seconds before collapsing in a heap to the floor. 

Bucky yanks free of Sam and sprints across the cold dark space. His knees ache when he falls to the ground at Steve’s side, hoisting him up and into his arms. “Steve, Steve,” he murmurs. “Hey, hey. Can you hear me?”

Steve’s eyes are closed and his skin is pale and cold. Up close, Bucky can see the bruises up and down his arms, needle marks in the soft skin at his elbows. His breathing is raspy - but his pulse is steady beneath Bucky’s searching fingers.

“You’re okay,” Bucky says and presses a kiss to his shaved head. “You’re okay now.”

Steve shudders hard, a full body motion, and then he opens his eyes.

Bucky can sense how the man standing over them tenses, as if waiting for Steve to attack again.

“I’m here. It’s Bucky,” Bucky murmurs instead, stroking his thumb over his brow. “I’m right here. Steve? Can you hear me?”

Steve blinks and licks his lips. His eyes are dazed but they focus on Bucky’s face after a long moment. “Buck,” he whispers. The bruises on his face are livid purple. “Issit you?”

“It’s me,” Bucky promises. He shifts on the hard floor, getting his legs underneath Steve’s back so he’s more comfortable. “I told you I’d come. We’re gonna get you home now. You’re gonna be okay.”

Steve huffs a little. “Home,” he repeats. His gaze roams the ceiling like he can’t quite see properly. “Did I do that?” he asks, brushing trembling fingers over Bucky’s aching face. 

“I’ve had much worse,” Bucky tells him gently. “It’s already healing.”

Steve frowns at him. “Did I hurt anyone?” His voice is slurred, barely a whisper.

“You banged up Tony’s suit a little but he’s always looking for an excuse to build a new one,” Natasha says and Bucky looks up to realize she’s kneeling on Steve’s other side. “Really you did him a favor.”

Steve doesn’t laugh but he sags a little, like he’s relieved. “He told me I was gonna hurt you,” he murmurs. “Didn’t want that.”

“I know. I know. We’re all okay. It’s not your fault.”

“Bucky,” Sam says, low and urgent. “We need to get him to a doctor. Look.” He points. 

Bucky follows his finger to the side of Steve’s head. Blood is trickling from his right ear, oozing down his neck. Fuck.

Tony curses somewhere behind him. “I’ll go get the quinjet,” he offers and Bucky hears Sam agreeing. 

“You’ll be okay,” Bucky tells Steve, trying to quell his own panic. “You’re going to be just fine.”

Steve mutters something, too soft for Bucky to hear. His eyelids are sagging, gaze drifting over the ceiling like he’s looking for something. 

“What was that, sweetheart?” he asks, smooths his thumb along Steve’s cheek,

Steve rallies a little, blinking until his eyes focus on Bucky’s. He holds Bucky’s gaze for a long moment and then he smiles, one bruised corner of his mouth turning upward. “Love you,” he whispers. 

Then, his eyes roll back and he begins to seize. 

### 

Steve doesn’t wake up: not when they carry him back to the quinjet, not when they land in Seoul so Helen Cho can take a look, not when they have to take off again just two hours later when Tony gets word that South Korean authorities are on the way to investigate why they’re there. 

Bucky can’t focus on anything but Steve, even as he knows other important things are happening. The man in the black suit is the Prince of Wakanda and he is the one who takes Zemo, hands cuffed and mouth gagged, back to Germany to present him to the Security Council. 

“He came to me in New York,” Sam tells him softly as they both sit near Steve. “He’d been running Wakanda’s own internal investigation into the bombing. When he realized it wasn’t Steve… well, he offered to help. I gave him the head’s up we were going to Siberia and he said he’d come.”

“Well without him, we would’ve been toast,” Natasha says from the pilot’s seat.

Stark uses FRIDAY to scan Steve’s head and Helen Cho reviews the scans as they fly over the Pacific, back toward the cove. 

“There’s damage - but you can see it’s already healing,” she explains on the video screen. “He’ll probably sleep for a few days. Keep him warm and comfortable and call me if anything changes.”

Tony briefly argues for taking Steve back to New York - but Bucky overrides him fast. Steve belongs in their home. Bucky had promised he would take him back there. 

They land in the late afternoon and Wanda greets them on the bluff, the dogs barking around her. She embraces Bucky and then lays her hand on Steve’s forehead, red mist swirling around her fingers. 

“He’s very quiet,” she tells Bucky as he and Sam lift the stretcher, carrying Steve down the ramp and into the cool sunshine. 

“Dr. Cho said he is healing,” Bucky tells her. “He’ll be okay.”

She nods but something in her eyes is troubled still.

The house seems exactly as Bucky had left it. The goats are lowing at each other over the hum of the generators and the crashing of waves. He smells freshly turned earth and berries, almost too ripe. 

He brushes his fingers along the stubby hairs on Steve’s scalp and hopes he can sense it too.

Bucky settles Steve in their big bed upstairs, propped up on pillows so his face is pointed toward the cove. When Steve wakes up, Bucky wants the first thing he sees to be the ocean and the trees and the mountains. He wants him to feel their own sheets and smell Bucky near him. 

After he’s taken a shower, he curls next to Steve, picking up his husband’s hand and kissing each finger before sliding his wedding band back into its rightful place. “Sam kept it safe for you,” he tells Steve, laying their hands together so the rings are side by side. 

He sits with Steve into the evening, the dogs sprawled out on the mattress next to Steve and the cats keeping watch from the window sill. Wanda brings up soup and tea and reads to him a little before she goes to bed herself, brushing a hand over Steve’s shoulder.

When the house is dark and still, Bucky finally brings out the Soul stone from where he had hidden it within his hand. He lays it on the bedside table, unsure of what to do with it. It had healed him, he knows.

He remembers being in the homeless encampment and the big man kneeling next to him, older but still recognizable as Steve. He remembers how the man had laid the stone in his hand and curled his fingers around it. He’d said something, spoken some quiet words, and the stone had flared, bright and beautiful and Bucky had felt safe, loved, whole. The world had blurred around him and he’d collapsed, only coming to when he was laying on a couch in Steve’s apartment and the older Steve vanished. 

What had the Steve from the future said? What were the magic words to restore a mind and soul? Were the words even needed? 

Bucky crawls onto the bed, curls himself around Steve’s lax body. He presses his nose to the side of Steve’s neck and smells the soap he’d used to wash his hair earlier that evening. 

“Come back to me,” he whispers and falls asleep listening to Steve’s heartbeat.

In the morning, he wakes up and nothing has changed. Steve is still pressed against him and the dogs are over their legs. He smells coffee from below and he sits up, slowly, dropping his face in his hands. The sunlight is pooling on the bottom of their bed and he stares into the light before twisting to look at Steve.

Steve’s eyes are open.

Bucky almost chokes in his rush to scramble onto his knees, pressing both hands to either side of Steve’s face. “Steve? Steve?” 

The dogs scramble off the bed at his motion, Dumbo barking a little in excitement.

Steve reacts to none of it. He blinks slowly, the bright blue of his eyes muted and glassy. There’s no color in his cheeks, even as warm, steady breaths brush against Bucky’s skin. 

Bucky swallows, hard. “It’s okay,” he soothes, petting Steve’s hair. “I remember feeling all scrambled after the chair too. It’s okay. You’ll come back when you’re ready. Can you sit up for me?”

Steve does nothing for a long moment but then allows Bucky to settle him more upright against the pillows. He swallows, the muscles in his throat working, but makes no sound, even when Bambi leaps up and licks at his face.

“You remember Bambi, right?” Bucky says, keeping one hand on Steve’s cheek. “I brought you home. Wanda is downstairs and Dumbo’s right here next to you. The cats are probably out chasing mice in the barn. We’re all here. You’re safe.”

Steve is staring out the window, though none of his facial muscles move. Bucky wonders if he can see the blue sky, the hint of gray storm clouds far over the ocean. 

He manages to coax Steve out of bed and into the bathroom, helps him brush his teeth and wash his face. Steve doesn’t say a word but he follows Bucky’s gentle touches easily, letting Bucky dress him in a fresh shirt and a warm sweater and thick socks. He slides the Soul Stone into his pocket, just in case it will help.

Dumbo and Bambi follow closely at his heels, though they’re careful to not trip him. 

Bucky leads him down the stairs once they’re both dressed, trying to talk like this is any other day. He updates Steve on the crops and the berry patches and how the stream is swollen this year from all the rains in April. 

Wanda takes their appearance in stride, giving Steve a gentle hug, though he does not hug back, and helping him sit down at the table. She waits to ask until she’s with Bucky over by the stove. “Has he said anything?”

Bucky inhales, a tremble deep within his lungs. “No. I remember… I think I was like this sometimes, after missions and the chair. He just needs time.”

She nods and her eyes look very old for a moment. “I can’t sense him,” she says. “His mind is never quiet like this.”

Bucky shakes his head. “He’ll be fine.”

“If he stays like this,” she says quietly, “we should call Dr. Cho. Maybe there is something…”

“No,” Bucky says. “He’s going to be fine.” 

He’s had enough of the outside world. Both of them have. If he calls them, they’ll come out and take Steve away to a hospital and run tests. They won’t want him to stay here, safe with Bucky. “I can take care of him just fine. Been doing it since he was six years old.”

Steve eats breakfast mechanically. He sits at the table until Bucky directs him over to the couch, helping him curl up with his favorite blanket. Then, he stays there, gazing blankly at the dark TV.

Sam calls while Bucky is cleaning up the kitchen. “There’s a congressional hearing,” Sam tells him, sounding exhausted but happy. “Ross is in deep shit right now. Zemo is being held to await trial and Wakanda has introduced amendments to the Accords.”

Bucky nods and watches Steve watch the TV. “That’s good, Sam.”

“I’m gonna go to Washington with Rhodes tomorrow,” Sam continues. He sounds better than he has in months. “Stark is meeting us there and we’re going to present the evidence of that underwater prison Ross was running, all of it. He’s gonna pay.”

“I’m glad.” Bucky squeezes the bridge of his nose and tries to match Sam’s tone. “Really, Sam. That’s wonderful.”

Sam pauses. “How’s Steve?”

Bucky swallows. “He’s fine. Just needs to rest up, just like Cho said. He’ll be back running around the cliffs in no time.”

“We’re all here for you guys, you know that right?”

“Yeah, Sam. I know. We just need some time and space.”

After Bucky hangs up, he joins Steve on the couch, twines his fingers between Steve’s cool, still hand. He leans his head against Steve’s shoulders. Dumbo lays across their feet and Bambi puts his head in his lap. Steve breathes gently. 

“I don’t want to let you leave here,” Bucky whispers to him. “This is where you would want to be, I know it.”

They stay, just like that, until the dogs get restless and Bucky leads Steve to the yard, the dogs racing ahead of them and barking into the still cool morning air.

Bucky takes him to the goat pen, helps him sit down in the long grass and turns his hands over until they form cups, pouring goat feed into his palms. The littlest goats prance over and snuffle at his hands, eating the feed with their soft lips. 

“This is Buttercup and Violet,” Bucky says. “You think it’s silly I keep naming all the goats after flowers - but we have to have a system right? Flowers for the goats, Disney characters for the dogs, old actors for the cats. It keeps things organized.”

Steve looks pale in the sunshine but Bucky thinks there’s a flicker in his gaze when Buttercup butts his stomach gently.

After lunch, Bucky takes the dogs for a walk, arm in arm with Steve along the bluffs. The gray storm clouds are nearer now, thick and heavy a summer rain. The flowers are all in full bloom, vibrant among the tall grasses.

They walk for almost two miles before Bucky steers them back toward home, taking care to choose the smoother and easier paths for Steve. 

Before they go back, Bucky guides Steve down the winding path to the cove and takes off both of their shoes, rolling up their jeans so they can wade in the water.

The dogs dart in and out of the waves, barking happily, and gulls cry overhead. The wind is picking up a little, smelling of salt and seaweed. 

Bucky sits them both in the sand after, pulls Steve against his chest and watches as the storm clouds come closer and closer and the tide pulls back into the ocean. “No matter what,” he says. “You’ll be safe here. We’ll be safe here. No matter how long it takes you to come back to me…”

He has to stop because the grief is heavy in his throat. 

Carefully, he digs through the pocket of Steve’s sweater and pulls out the Soul Stone. “This helped me find you,” he tells Steve, turning the gem over in his hands. “It led me back to you the first time. It gave me back my memories. Maybe it can help you too. I hope it can.”

He swallows and leans his forehead against the side of Steve’s head, squeezing the stone as tight as he dares. “All I want,” he says, a wish, “is for you to come back to me. For us to be happy and whole.”

He keeps his eyes closed, feeling the gritty sand under his bare feet and the warmth of Steve’s body. He can hear the barking of the dogs and the ocean waves crashing down in an endless rhythm. 

“I love you,” he tells Steve, remembering the first time they sat on this beach, years ago. “We made it. We’re home. Can you feel me here? I hope you can.”

Behind his eyelids, he first thinks he’s imagining the orange glow. But then, it swells and grows, and when Bucky opens his eyes, the sky is gray and the Soul Stone is shining brilliantly between his fingers, rays of light peeking through the cracks and shimmering across the dark ocean and pale sand. It’s warm in his hand, vibrating gently and Bucky holds it tighter and thinks, please, not even daring to look at Steve.

Steve inhales, roughly, like one does when waking up from a dream. His hand twitches within Bucky’s, the tiniest flicker. After a long moment, in a scratchy voice, he says, “Buck?”

The sky chooses that moment to split open with a crash of thunder, rain gushing down across the ocean and the beach, turning the sand thick and dark around them. Bucky doesn’t feel it, though. He sits back on his knees so he can see Steve fully: see the way his eyes are still a little foggy but present, the way his mouth curves up in a smile, the way Steve’s fingers are squeezing his back. 

“Steve,” Bucky says and leans in to kiss him, his own tears mingling with the rain. 

The Soul Stone shines brightly and Steve kisses him back.

_The end._

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who came along on this ride! I hope you enjoyed this little tale!!
> 
> Thanks again to Alby Mangroves for the outstanding beta and Odetteandodile for the amazing, beautiful art. And thank you to all of you for commenting and kudosing and making this all worth it <3
> 
> I'm on twitter @kristeneyres if you ever want to scream at me about writing or Steve Rogers or any other MCU character! Until the next tale!!


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